One of the most common topics that our customers ask about, is the ability to manage different versions of projects in Decisions. Whether you’re looking to manage different versions of rules, workflows or entire projects, there are several options for doing this in Decisions.
History, Documentation & Checkpoints
Perhaps the easiest way to manage versions is to take advantage of the autosave feature in Decisions. When a user builds or debugs in Decisions, the platform periodically and automatically stores backup versions of the entities being worked on. Additionally, you have the option of manually create checkpoints to save an entity at any point. In the Designer Studio, you then have several options for viewing and acting on the different versions. One option is to right click on an entity in your project. When you do this a History/Documentation menu option pops up. This will give you the option to open/view, to add comments, to add a document or to add an external link. When you select the open/view option you can see all the different versions and who made them. You then have the option to delete versions, to add tags, to view dependencies, to edit names and descriptions of the versions, to Import/Export into projects, and to restore from backup.
Making Copies & Templates
Another common requirement that our customers have is to allow for different versions of projects, rules, or workflows to be used for different situations. Some clients have the need for different rules to execute under different circumstances or time frames. Other clients have the need to have different versions of workflows or rules that run for different customers. Whatever your reason for using multiple versions, the ability to create copies and templates in Decisions is an important feature. You can easily make copies of individual entities or entire projects in Decisions and then use those copies outright in a different project, or you have the option to use them as a template that you can then further modify. This makes it easy to run different versions.
External Tools / Decisions Designer Repository
Another option for managing versions is to use an external version control tool. We have several clients that use tools such as MS TFS, git, subversion or cvs. While integrating with these tools can be straight forward, the ultimate flexibility and control over different versions is achieved with the Decisions Designer Repository. The Designer Repository is a Decisions instance that can be used as a central location for storing, managing and transporting versions through your different environments. If you have multiple Decisions environments, such as development, test and production, there is no better way to manage the staging between these environments, than with a Decisions Designer Repository.
