I may have a need eventually to merge two Cognos projects I'm working on. I'm using FM 10.2.1. What is the best way to go about it?
Both projects have the same data source connection, but have different views in their respective database layers. I've tried merging them already and can never seem to get past Transaction #4 when performing the merge. Cognos always errors out on
Error at Transaction 4, Action 1
Action: Modify failed, skipping...
Reason: BME-SP-0023 Invalid property handle ID: /O/name[0]/O/[Model]
It looks like you are working with a branched model, so that's good.
I have on occasion had trouble with merging. It's usually caused by forgetting to merge changes in the branch into the main for a long time or due to check-in conflicts in the version control software. Fortunately, a Framework Manager model is just an XML document. You can merge them by editing the text in a text editor. It's just a simple copy and paste, just be sure you're in the right part of the document. Beware: Notepad doesn't handle large text files. Use something like Notepad++.
You will probably also need to clean out the log files to ensure a future merge starts from where your text editing leaves off. I think it's the log.xml file. You can verify by editing it then trying a merge. If you delete everything except the StartLog transaction, the last StartSession transaction and one transaction in the last session, then try the merge, you should see only one item to merge. If that's the case, cancel the merge and clear out the last two transactions in the log file. Try the merge again and it should tell you there's nothing to merge. Make a change in the branch and try the merge again and you should see the new change.
And don't forget to make a backup before you start.
In looking at the model.xml. Which part is the part that I should paste?
The XML is laid out the same as the structure you see in FM. If you are having trouble reading the XML, you should probably not use that approach.
I tried it once - and it worked ok. I grabbed everything between the first and last <namespace> tags, and it created an additional namespace (with the same name as the model I was merging to, but that was to be expected) with all three layers of my previous model in it. But I wasn't sure how that would function if I brought all of the presentation layer items from both namespaces into the same package, so I reverted to the original state. Maybe I should try it again.