Building Better Software Together
| Integrating Subversion with IBM Rational Team Concert (RTC) |
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Customers using or evaluating IBM Rational Team Concert (RTC) should be aware that they can integration Rational Team Concert with Subversion configuration management rather than using the default of DB2 or Oracle.
RTC 2.0 and Subversion 1.5/1.6 plus Subclipse 1.6 was used for the Rational Team Concert / Subversion integration demonstrated shown below. Note Subclipse 1.6 was imported into the RTC Eclipse client. Following the instructions in the online help (available from the client at "Integrating -> Rational Team Concert and Subversion -> Linking work items to Subversion repositories"). Essentially, Bugtrac properties are added to the subversion project directory so that when a commit is made, a work item field is available on the commit dialog. This field is available on any commit dialog, be it Subclipse, tortoise or other products that recognise a bugtrac property.  Fig 1 - Subclipse dialog showing Work Item (Bugtrac) field Note that there can be a few problems... RTC eclipse comes with links to Subclipse 1.2, which is getting old. Using Subversion 1.5 on the evaluation PC the preferred Subclipse would have been 1.4. Checkouts from Subclipse worked but updates and commits caused errors. This resulted in an upgrade to SVN 1.6 and Subclipse 1.6. Updates now worked but there were still problems with commits both within Subclipse and Tortoise. Eventually the problem came down to a directory which had the permissions incorrectly set (no read or write access) on my "secret" directory. Suspect the problem lay with my situation rather than SVN 1.6 or Subclipse. The end integration was unimpressive "nothing to show what files had changed within the new revision. This was because the "Update Links" had not been implemented" see Fig 2. There is a process which runs to automate this but initially it is better to update manually as you can visually see something actually happening.  Fig 2 - Update Links in context menu in Jazz SVN Connections. After the links have been updated, the work item shows subversion information in the "links" tab. See Fig 3  Fig 3 - Open the revision associated with the task This will open the history for the revision (and all previous revisions) in a history tab. See Fig 4. From here a file versions can be compared. So we can see that revision 15 was made up of two changes - test2.tx was added and design.doc was modified.  Fig 4 - Subversion revisions Despite the challenges getting it to work, the end result is very good. Using Subversion as the source control tool with RTC is a preferred way of configuring RTC compared to the recommended databases such as SQL Server or DB2. Of course, you still need a database for all of the other data created in RTC. But using subversion gives the best of both worlds. You can access source code both within Eclipse and outside of it. If you decide to move away from RTC then your code is easily available. If you have code tools that have not yet been moved to eclipse then these can access code via a subversion working directory and eclipse can be used for managing tasks. Sincere thanks to John Norris, a Clearvision associate, for putting the time and effort into this article. Clearvision offer Rational Team Concert license discounts along with training, support and products for both Subversion and RTC... have you thought about using UCM with Subversion? |
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