Version Control

[actcognosuser]

HI All,
           We do not have a version control in place.Any suggestions on effective version control tools for cognos 8?

Can we save report versions too or only framework manager model  files(.cpf).

COuld anyone please list out best practises?

Thanks in advance!

[MFGF]

Hi,

Framework Manager supports direct integration with two source control systems - Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, and CVS.

There is no direct integration for reports, but these could be saved externally and manually checked in/out of a source control system.

Regards,

MF.

[m23]

Framework Manager supports direct integration with two source control systems - Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, and CVS.

CVS Integration with framework manager is a buggy mess. It was terrible in 8.1 and still bad in 8.3. Last I heard Cognos was discontinuing support for CVS. I would stay well away unless you want your model files to be slowly and silently corrupted. Every checkin you do will cause it to get worse. That was my experience anyway. Cognos support ended up having to manually rebuild my model. I reckon it took them days.

[blom0344]

The lack of a good 'native' version control implementation borders on the criminal   ;D

VSS for storing FM models works very well for us, but storing the XML definitions of reports is truly a workaround. Lots of report related metadata is stored in the content store (like multilingual labels) and that is all lost when using a third party version control system.
The weird thing is ,that whereas Cognos allows to set a user as owner of  a report this is not displayed in the GUI (the fickle mod date IS) and can only be found by entering the report properties. If it were only possible to have a lock on a report by this owner property it would make team-based development a LOT easier.

[cognosjon]

We had a look at the version control software offered by Brightstar. The web demo they provided looked very impressive and was certainly the way forward. Unfortunately for the small team in which I work it's a tad expensive for us.
If your a big software house or consultancy they may be worth a look. (No i'm not on commission, I just liked what I saw).

Hopefully IBM will get their finger out with this one as we really need something within the tool to help us.