Here's an interesting one.

We've got several development and R&D servers onto which I deploy the DCR I
produce. The manual deployments happen relatively irregularly over the
course of a week or so, and then the DCR is intergrated into a site build
that is installed onto other servers at other times. Depending on the time
of day, one set of servers may have one version of the DCR, and another set
may have another version. Eventually, a specific version is tagged as a
build candidate, and it gets packaged up in our build process and installed
on the QA boxes for testing.

The DCR can be run in a "QA Mode" that displays several bits of information
in the stage area for testing purposes only. One bit of info, which is very
important to the testers, is the "Submission Level". That's simply a letter
(A, B, C...and so on), which is manually incremented in my "startMovie"
handler each time a I publish a DCR destined for the build and a submission
into QA. We track our defects (bugs) using the Submission Level as the key
for regressions, etc.

But at the development and R&D boxes, there may be several versions of the
DCR deployed during any given day, and it becomes important for the content
reviewers and production people to know EXACTLY what version of the DCR
they're looking at. It becomes even more important to ME when the content
and curriculum people approach me wondering if the version they're looking
at has that one little fix I implemented earlier in the day...or not. I
don't have any way of telling them if it does, because all we can see as a
result of running it in "QA Mode" is a Submission Level letter. For these
particular servers, that's just not enough info.

I need more granularity in my versioning display. But I do not want to have
to increment or edit a string in Lingo every single time I publish the DCR
(which is dozens of times per day). I need some sort of automated way to get
my DCR the information it needs to display a "version" tied to the specific
instance of publishing the DCR. How can I do that???

I really wish there was some message sent to movie scripts whenever a DCR
was about to be published, so that I could alter via Lingo the movie script
that contains my version string. I could insert the current date and time,
and have that available via a global variable at runtime. That way, I could
also display the "publish date and time" of the DCR when it was run in "QA
Mode".

Anybody got any tricks up their sleeves for doing this sor of thing? Any
alternative ways of looking at this problem?

Christopher Watson
Sr. Software Engingeer
Director/Shockwave Development
Lightspan, Inc.
Tel: 858.824.8457
Fax: 858.824.8008

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