Best way to collaborate on working on 1 analysis file without losing changes

[Georgi Koemdzhiev]

Hello, my team and I have to do work on 1 analysis file. To avoid losing changes, we have agreed that only 1 person is allowed to apply changes at a time. To keep track of the changes we decided to use Git. So we put the analysis file in a Git repository. That way we can use the commit messages to refer to specific work being done in the past (i.e. if we need to revert the file to a previous state).

Having said that, the above way of work is not ideal.Normally in a version control project, we should be able to collaborate and we should be able to resolve "Merge conflicts"if another person have changed the same line of a file and decided what change we would like to pick "theirs" or "ours". So I decided to experiment with the analysis file and unzip it to its consisting files:

 

Most of the files (except the image and the txt file) are XML files which are run through a minification algorithm (to take less space on disk) so there is no formatting - everything is on 1 line. For example, this is how the "7.11-AnalysisDocument.xml" looks like (note the length of the file):

 

In the current state of all of these XML files, it's impossible to use a version control system like Git as they track changes on individual lines of code and in that case, all of the XML files have only 1 line of code. So even if we put the unzipped version of our analysis file into Git it will be pointless as it git will show that the whole line have changed when somebody applies a change to the document.

 

So I thought maybe we should create a script and attach it to the pre-commit Git hook(git allows us to execute a script before we execute the commit action) that will unzip the document and formatall of its XML files in there so that everything is formatted on the appropriate line:

 

However, that sounds like overcomplicating the initial problem, there has to be an easier way to do that.Can anybody give me any pointers on how a team can collaborate on working with 1 analysis file without losing changes

[Khushboo Rabadia]

This is currently not feasible in spotfire. You can raise this idea in ideas portal describing this usecase.

https://ideas.tibco.com/

This is the most effective way for you to interface directly with our product team and see the status of your enhancement ideas. For more details, please refer tohttps://community.spotfire.com/wiki/introduction-spotfire-idea-portal.

[Georgi Koemdzhiev]

Thanks! I have created an idea: https://ideas.tibco.com/ideas/TS-I-7642