Hi Nigel, basically I'm interested, we are following a similar approach. I should explain it a bit.
At first we use a modified version of the mentioned vc-framework component. It saves all changes in the code to text files immediately and keeps track of the timestamps of the changes in an external database. The text files can be committed to a source code versioning tool like svn, mercurial, git ... This is the basic idea behind the vc-framework. We extended it a bit to allow reimporting of the exported code. So we are able to switch between branches and we can do team development without a development server and dev clients. All members of our team use single user instances of 4D. The result of the development will be compiled into a built/merged server application. A very old version (V13 yet) with import code can be found on Github: https://github.com/elutz/vc-framework-v13 But there are some disadvantages of this approach, all based on the limitations of 4D's way to handle the code. At first, the comparison of the exported and the present code in the database is based only on timestamps, that is a bit fragile. Most of the time it works, but if problems are happening the solution is sometimes difficult and a bit time consuming (re-export and re-import of thousands of methods). Another problem is the reliability of the component since 4D V15. Very often the immediate export of the code doesn't work and you have to trigger it manually. If the developer forget this additional step, he will check in only a part of his new code. Because of that we don't recommend to take it 1:1 regardless we are using it a quite long time. As a task we have to invest time to improve and adapt the component to make it more reliable again. I hope, there were some interesting thoughts ... Regards Lutz ********************************************************************** 4D Internet Users Group (4D iNUG) FAQ: http://lists.4d.com/faqnug.html Archive: http://lists.4d.com/archives.html Options: http://lists.4d.com/mailman/options/4d_tech Unsub: mailto:[email protected] **********************************************************************
