Baselines, Differencing and Merges

baselines_differencing_and_merges

Enterprise Architect (Corporate Edition) includes tools to help you manage and review changes to your models over time. These tools apply the concepts of Baselines, Differencing and Merges.

Baselines

Enterprise Architect (Corporate edition) provides a facility to create a Baseline or snapshot of the contents of a selected package and its child packages at a particular point in time, enabling you to later compare that branch of the model at that time with the current state of the branch. Baselines are stored in the same XML format as is used for version control, but are stored within the project in compressed format. You can also have parallel copies of parts of your model for team development, and create Baselines within each copy to merge changes into the project master.

Differencing

Differencing (Diff, or Compare) enables you to explore the differences between the current state of a specific part of your project, and previous or parallel versions captured in a Baseline or an XML file on disk.

Merges

Once Differencing is complete, you can merge information from the Baseline into the current project; it is not possible to go the other way. You can merge information manually, change by change, or automatically by electing to merge in all changes in one batch procedure. You can also revert completely to the original Baseline by importing the stored XMI directly, and merge in information and elements from a Baseline in a different project, making it possible to keep multiple versions of a single model in synch.

Notes:
  • You use Baselines, Differencing and Merges essentially to compare two snapshots of a specific part of your project, to capture the differences between them and either roll back or incorporate selected changes or all changes. Enterprise Architect Corporate edition has another facility, Auditing, which you can switch on to perform continuous monitoring of changes across the project. You can dovetail your use of each facility to meet the range of your change management requirements.
  • If a package under version control forms part of a Baseline, and that package is checked in to the model, you cannot merge the original data from the Baseline into that package.
  • If security is enabled you must have Manage Baselines permission to create, import and delete Baselines, and Restore From Baseline permission to merge data from a Baseline. Security permissions are not required to select an existing Baseline and perform a comparison with the model.