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March 17, 2006

SnTT: Homegrown Application Change Documentation
Posted by Don McNally in Guest Bloggers

Don here once more. Change control in your application development has become increasingly important over the last couple of years. How good is your system for documenting changes? There are products out there to help manage the process and keep track of which design elements have changed but you can develop a basic system on your own.

In the Lotus Sandbox at developerWorks: Lotus (LDD/Notes.net) you can find the DatabaseDesign class. We used this class as the basis for developing code that compares design elements in two databases to identify differences. The databases can be two replicas of the same database (for example one local and one on the server) or two copies of a database (for example one development and one production). Within the same application, we also used the class to create lists of design items to populate drop down lists in a dialog box; that lets users create their own list of changed design items by choosing from lists.

Unfortunately, at this time I am not able to show you the code we developed, but I thought it was worthwhile to point out that the class is out there (thanks Damien Katz and Andre Guirard) and that it can be helpful in developing a change recording system. Contact me if you run into problems developing your change recorder.

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Comments

Alternatively you could purchase an off-the-shelf source code control solution such as Teamstudio CIAO! (which includes the ability to compare different versions of elements).
And the ever-popular Delta which allows comparisons of 2 Notes (design or data) in the same or different dbs.

Posted by: Simon Peek at April 3, 2006 09:56 AM

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