What’s New in AccuRev 7.0

AccuRev 7.0 contains new features designed to increase productivity among software development teams, including several change package usability enhancements and a new Show Ancestry feature in the GUI’s Version Browser. AccuRev 7.0 also provides replica rollback capability, performance improvements, a database upgrade, and a new built-in license manager.

Disaster Recovery - Replica Rollback

Replica rollback streamlines disaster recovery operations in a replicated environment. When the master AccuRev server has been restored to a previous backup, the replica sync command detects the change and initiates the rollback. The operation calculates how far back the replica must roll, removing database transactions and unused storage containers in depot slices. It then performs the normal sync to bring the replica in sync with the master.

License Manager

AccuRev 7.0 replaces the Reprise RLM license manager with a new built-in license manager. The new license manager supports named and floating licenses. The license file is now named aclicense.txt instead of accurev.lic.

See the AccuRev Administrator’s Guide for a full description of license management in AccuRev 7.0.

Change Package Usability Enhanements

Promote and Demote an Issue Variant

AccuRev 7.0 provides the ability to promote or demote an issue variant in certain use cases. The prerequisites for promoting or demoting an issue variant are the same as those for operating on a regular (non-variant) issue: no dependencies on other issues; no overlap; the basis version must be in the backing stream; and the version must coalesce with the backing stream versions.

Show Diff By Issues

In AccuRev 7.0 the Show Diff by Issues operation can display differences in issue variants.

Change Package Dependencies

AccuRev 7.0 can display change package dependencies of an issue variant. That is, it can display the issues that a particular issue variant depends on, ignoring the issues that other variants might depend on.

Merge with Backing Stream

For the merge with backing stream operation, AccuRev 7.0 has switched the “Merge-from” version and the direct ancestor version in the Version Browser display. The red merge line now originates at a workspace version instead of a backing stream version. This change enables a rebase merge to occur without losing any change package information. This change affects only Merge operations executed in 7.0 and later; it does not modify Merge operations recorded prior to 7.0.

New “Already Included” Change Package Element Status

In the GUI’s Show Active Issues tab, clicking on an issue in the top pane causes the bottom pane to display data about the elements in that issue’s change package, including the version and status of each element. In AccuRev 7.0, the status of an element might be displayed as “Already Included”. This means that the exact version that is part of the change package is not in the stream, but a variant of it is. The version in the stream (the variant) is either a merge ancestor or a path ancestor of the version in the change package.

GUI Improvements

Show Ancestry Feature of Version Browser

The Version Browser’s new Show Ancestry feature helps the user see through the clutter of a complex, crowded version tree. The new Ancestry button in the Version Browser allows the user to select a version in the display and then toggle between displaying only the ancestor versions of the selected version (along with related virtual versions) and displaying all of the element’s versions. The Show Ancestry context menu item enables the user to continually refine the display by viewing the ancestors of one version, then the ancestors of one of those ancestors, etc.

Stream Browser Performance

AccuRev 7.0 accomplishes a significant improvement in Stream Browser performance by implementing lazy rendering of versions in the Stream Browser display. As the user scrolls to different parts of the version tree, the versions in those parts are rendered in the display and then cached. This approach dramatically speeds up opening a Stream Browser in a depot that has thousands of streams.

Rich Text Editor

A new rich text editor is included in AccuRev 7.0. It resolves some defects related to pasting text into the editor, and it supports the new Spell Checking feature.

Spell Checking

Spell checking functionality has been added to the AccuRev GUI. A new AccuRev preference called Enable Spell Checking toggles spell checking functionality in Text- and Log-type issue fields and in the comment field for operations like Keep and Promote. Toggling the value affects tabs that are opened from that time forward; tabs that are already open are not affected.

Spell checking functionality:

Potential misspellings are highlighted by a red underline. The case of the first letter of any word is not significant during dictionary lookup.
Spell checking can be done either from the context menu or by pressing the F7 key to bring up a dialog.
In rich-text fields, correcting a spelling error removes any formatting of the word.
Users can define their own dictionaries and change the language used for spell checking. Currently supported languages are: English, German, Spanish, French, and Portuguese.

Database Upgrade