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Enable and Use Team Development

Overview

The Jet Data Manager offers functionality that supports multiple users working on a project concurrently. Without this functionality only one user at a time can be in the project. In addition, features have been added to allow more detailed tracking of changes through the use of Version Notes and functionality to allow other members of the team to know what a user is working on through the use of Work Items. Team Development is an add-on feature that is available for purchase.

Topics:

Enable Team Environment Adding Work Items Add Version Notes
Concurrent Users View Work Items View Version Notes
Edit Work Items
Delete Work Items

Enable the Team Development Environment

To utilize Team Development it must first be turned on for a particular project.

  1. With no project open, click the Tools dropdown and select Repository Administration.

  2. Click the desired project to highlight it, select Enable Team Development, and close the window. Multiple users can now access the project concurrently.

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    Note: If receiving "cannot acquire exclusive lock" error, make sure you do not have that project open.

Add Work Items

Work Items allow other members of the team to know what another user is working on. This will give a visual indication as to what areas of the project are currently under development. Work items are meant to be created immediately prior to starting work on a set of objects and can be either manually deleted or removed during deployment of the object.

  1. To add a Work Item, right click the object to add the Work Item for and select Add Work Item.

    Work Items can be added to the following objects:

    • Project
    • Data Warehouse
    • Data Warehouse table
    • Staging Database
    • Staging Database table
    • Data Source table
    • OLAP Database
    • Cube

    If the object that the user is adding the Work Item to already has a Work Item created by another user, it will display Add Work Item in red and identify the other user below.  This allows users to know if other users may be modifying the same object in the near future to help facilitate collaboration.

  2. Enter description for the Work Item.

  3. Click Create Work Item.

How to View Existing Work Items

Viewing existing Work Items will give the user information regarding Work Items that they have created, Work Items that other users have created, which users are currently in the project, and if there is any risk of overlap regarding changes made to objects based on the existing Work Items.

  1. To view existing Work Items, click the Tools dropdown and select Work Items.

  2. The Work Items screen will show numerous pieces of information.

  3. The top pane will show Work Items that have been created by the current user. The bottom pane will show Work Items that have been created by other users.

    The information displayed is described below:

    Column Description
    Object Type The type of object the Work Item is associated with (project, database, table, or cube).
    Object Name The name of the project, database, table, or cube associated with the Work Item
    User The user name of the person who created the Work Item
    Machine The machine that the Work Item was created on.
    Description Descriptive text defined by the user for the Work Item
  4. In the upper right-hand corner in the Active Users pane all users currently accessing the project are shown.

    To facilitate easy identification of possible conflicts, Work Items that share the same Object Name for different users are highlighted red. This will allow the users to know that some collaboration will need to be done regarding which user is accessing the data. While Team Development allows multiple users to modify the project concurrently, these users should not modify the same object at the same time.

    For more information, see Concurrent Users Modifying the Same Object.

  5. All Work Items that are black represent a Work Item that is only flagged by a single user.

    Work Items that have been completed by another user will be shown as green to other users once the user has saved or deployed and marked the Work Item as completed.

Edit a Work Item

Work Items can only be edited by the user that created the Work Item.

  1. From the Tools dropdown, click Work Items.

  2. In the top pane of the Work Items screen right click the Work Item to edit and select Edit Work Item.

  3. Update the Work Item description and click Update Work Item to save the changes.

Delete Work Items

Work Items can only be edited by the user that created the Work Item.

  1. From the Tools dropdown, click Work Items.

  2. In the top pane of the Work Items screen right click the Work Item to edit and select Delete Work Item.

  3. Confirm the Work Item deletion by clicking Yes.

  4. Alternatively, Work Items can be deleted by right-clicking on the object from the tree itself and selecting Delete Work Item.

    Work Items can also be removed when adding Version Notes, which is discussed below.

Add Version Details

Version details allow users to type comments about changes that they have made to a project. These comments can then be viewed in the future to reference changes that were made.

  1. To ensure Version Notes are enabled, go to the Tools dropdown and click Options or press F10.

  2. Change the Prompt for version details: radio button to either Prompt on Every Project Save or Prompt on Project Deployment Save. Click OK.

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    If Prompt on Every Project Save is select it will prompt the user to enter a Version Note when an object is deployed or when the Save button is pressed. If Prompt on Project Deployment Save is selected it will only prompt the user to enter a Version Note when an object is deployed.

    Deploy an object or set of objects in the project. After the Start button is pressed the Version Note window will appear.

    The user can type in the details that they would like to have included in the Version Note. If relevant, they can also select one of their existing Work Items to associate with the Version Note. By default, selecting a Work Item will also remove the Work Item from the list of existing Work ItemsIf the user wishes to associate a Work Item with the Version Note but not remove the Work Item the Keep Associated Work Items box can be checked. If the user does not wish to save a Version note for this deployment they can click Close and it will close the Version Note window without saving a Version Note.

View Version Notes

Viewing Version Notes can be useful when a user would like to look back and see when particular changes were made.

  1. Version Notes are viewed when the project it opened. To view the Version Notes, the user will open a project by clicking File and then Open or Ctl+O.

  2. To view the versions, click Select Version.

  3. All saved versions of the project will be shown. Versions with a Version Note associated with them will have a preview of the note in the Version note column.

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    Hovering over the preview will give a quick description of the Version Note.

    Clicking on the preview will display the full version note as well as any Work Items associated with the Version Note.

Concurrent Users Modifying the Same Object

The Team Development functionality allows multiple users to access the project and see what other users are planning on work on through the use of Work ItemsIt is strongly encouraged that teams collaborate to not modify the exact same object at the same time. These situations will normally be very rare. If this scenario does occur the expected behavior is as follows:

  • If multiple users add or modify different sub-objects (such as fields) within the same object (such as a table) then the Jet Data Manager will save these changes and then the change will be displayed the next time that the Jet Data Manager is opened. For example, if a user adds two fields to a table and another user adds two different fields in the same table all four fields will be visible to one of the users the next time that they close and re-open the Jet Data Manager.
  • If multiple users modify the same sub-object (such as renaming a field name) at the same time the user who deploys and executes the changes last will take precedence and the project will reflect these changes.

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