Accurev: Restore workspace to older version - accurev

I'm a brand new to Accurev and I'm having many troubles with it. One of the developers I'm working with has promoted bad code (things are now broken that weren't before) for 2 months on a stream, and I'm wanting to get a copy of the original code before any changes were made to it.
I currently have a workspace, and whenever the other developer creates code, I pull his changes into this workspace attempting to fix the bugs. These changes are promoted to an existing issue within Accurev.
Is there any way I can perhaps create a second workspace and obtain a copy of the original code (before any changes were made)? My target date is March 14th.

I would suggest you revert or demote the bad code that was promoted into the stream (Depending on what version of AccuRev you are using). This would put the stream back into the state it was before the promotion occurred.
Below are some suggested readings on the related topics.
Best way to "un-promote" files in Accurev?
https://community.microfocus.com/borland/managetrack/accurev/w/wiki/26745/purge-revert-and-demote
https://community.microfocus.com/borland/managetrack/accurev/w/accurev_knowledge_base/25951/how-to-revert-changes-in-a-stream
https://community.microfocus.com/borland/managetrack/accurev/w/accurev_knowledge_base/26079/what-is-the-proper-way-to-revert-by-change-package

As an alternative, you could create a time-based stream below the one with the bad code. Set a time basis that predates the bad promote.

To do this, I right-clicked the stream >> New Snapshot.
I select "Specified" and enter the date (with a relative time).
From the Snapshot, I created a New Workspace which was then populated with previous code.
Hope this helps!

Related

Is there a way to recover my code in Microsoft Visual Studio Community?

Technology used:
Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2015
VB.NET
GitHub
When i was altering skin in my form to design it, i was having trouble undoing my design to return back to its normal design. And as i go to my Form in Solution Explorer and clicked Undo everything had vanished including my code. I'm having trouble on how to retrieve my code ? Is there a way to retrieve my codes and my design or a garbage collector where i can easily retrieve it?
I would be so happy for your suggestions.I really need your Help.
The only way that you will be able to retrieve your old code at this point is if you did a
git push origin master
(or other branch) to github before you made these changes.
If you haven't use Git Extensions - I would suggest downloading and linking it to your github repo for this project. Git Extensions will give you a nice quick view of all your branches and what is sitting in your local repo.
Provided that you did a
git commit
You will still have your changes saved locally and this can be easily identified using Git Extensions.
If you have made the changes after you did a commit, you will see the old code in Git Extensions. From here you will be able to revert selected lines or all of the files. This is provided, that you had at least one major commit in git before this happened.
Update 1:
Based on your comment on your OP you should still have the original files in git. You should then be able to find your code easily via Git Extensions. You should see a list of changed files and from here you can revert them easily.
Update 2: Based on your comments, it appears that you have completely lost your changes. Git is a change tracker - and based on what you have said you did an Undo Changes on git. This means, that git had reset all the changes that it was tracking and went back to the last commit that you made. There is no way to get your changes back unless you had the files stored on DropBox or something similar where files are tracked on each save of the file. With git, changes made are only stored once committed. If you do an undo changes on the git repo before committing what it actually does is a
git reset
This removes all the changes and reverts it to the last commit.
I've checked and found this. I expect this should deal with your problem. Afterall, as long as you didn't intentionally delete anything, they are still in your target folder where you saved it.
If you checked in your code BEFORE the error on GitHub you can try this:(although I am not certain of community edition as I know it works on Pro and Enterprise).
Go to class in question
Right Click to get context menu
Select Source Control>History
Select a prior version
Right Click Reset>Reset and Delete Changes
This will basically say: "I don't care what happened just take me back to my safe place at this point in time with all affected files!". When performing code I cannot stress the importance to having source control and committing often.

Exchanging work before accurev promote

My colleague and I are participating in a huge project located in Accurev. We've already created own workspaces backed with some stream (let's call it zzz-stream) which is used by many other participants, not only by us.
The point is that we want to exchange our work between our workspaces, make some changes, exchange again, etc. BEFORE making the changes accessible for others, i.e. in other words we don't want to propagate our changes until it is stable and tested, but we want be able to work on it together.
My idea was to create new stream (yyy-stream) backed with zzz-stream, and then change our workspaces to be backed with yyy-stream. But unfortunately I have no rights to create streams.
My second idea was to use a workspace as backed stream, but it doesn't work because Accurev can't use ws as backed stream.
Is there any solution for our problem?
UPD: I accepted Brad's answer as most detailed. However Accurev is too heavy and sluggish to be used effectively. So actually I prefer to use Git for internal needs over the accurev workspace. (see Accurev externally, git internally)
Your idea of creating the yyy-stream is the EXACT right way to do it. The other options are decent workarounds for one-off situations, but creating the extra stream is simple and is fully leveraging AccuRev's capabilities.
That being said, I understand that your admins have stream creation locked down. They of course want control, but should be allowing for maximizing developer productivity and not forcing workarounds like this. My guess is they have stream creation locked down to a particular group being enforced by the server-admin trigger. One common thing I have seen other large sites do is:
- allow streams to be freely created off of a list of acceptable streams (easy to do in the trigger)
- enforce naming rules on the stream creation. This is important to admins in large sites to keep things organized. Again, this is very easy to enforce via the server-admin trigger.
Bottom line, if this is a common situation, work with the admins to allow this capability as per the above. If they have any questions, they are more than welcome to contact AccuRev and we will help them out.
Your idea on using another stream for you and your peer is a good one and is commonly called a collaboration stream. If your site has stream creation locked down, you would need to work with your AccuRev administrator to make that happen.
Another option is for you and the other developer to pull the keeps from the other workspace into your own stream. This relies on both of you being diligent about doing keeps and then you can look at the history of the other developer's workspace to find the keep operation, right-click that transaction and then select Send to Workspace. The destination workspace must be your own.
A third option (more for a situation where you are in your workspace and know exactly what file you want to grab the other users changes)is to bring up the version browser for the file, right click and select history/browse versions. Look for the other workspace, highlight the version in that workspace, right click and select send to workspace. This will checkout that version into your workspace.
This is similar to the change palette suggestion but quicker if your looking to this on a file basis.
Another idea is to use different version control system (e.g. git or svn) over Accurev workspace to exchange the changes and keep our history separated from zzz-stream. (similar to Accurev externally, git internally) Only changed files should be added to other VCS, not whole project. Some merge problems occur though.

Move file in one AccuRev workspace that has been edited in another workspace

We have a need to refactor a code base. The thing is that this will be done by one person and it would be desirable to avoid having the rest of the development team sitting idle while this job takes place.
We therefore tried the following scenario to see if it is possible to work in parallel.
Created file test.txt in directory first in developer A's workspace.
Promoted this file.
Updated developer B's workspace, thereby getting file test.txt
In A's workspace moved file test.txt to directory second.
Promoted this move.
In B's workspace edited file test.txt while it still resides in directory first (no update is made thereby emulating that work is done while refactoring is taking place).
Tried to promote and got a message saying that file test.txt had been modified (correct, file has been moved).
Tried to merge but got an error message saying that AccuRev can't merge since the file is missing in directory second (where it has been moved).
Tried to update B's workspace but that is not allowed since there is a modified file that needs to be merged first.
We are now stuck in a catch 22 situation.
We did try to place a fake file in directory second but that is not being recognized since this file does not belong to the workspace.
Has anyone out there tried something like this and gotten it to work?
It is of course possible to copy files but if there is a better way we would be grateful to hear about this. Or if this is a known bug or limitation in the tool.
We will contact also contact AccuRev support but I thought that I might be able to get some useful tips from the community.
Currently we are using AccuRev client 5.5.0.
Thanks for any suggestions on how to make the tool support this operation.
Referring to your steps 6 & 7: In AccuRev 5.5 after a file is edited and has a (modified) status you first have to keep before you can promote.
At step 8 you could try doing the merge from the Browse Versions view of the file. That way you can select any node to merge with, including the one that has been moved.
Step 9. An AccuRev update will not run successfully if one of the files to be updated is (modified). This is by design. You can keep the file so it has (kept)(member) status then run the update.
David Howland
After contact with AccuRev support the answer is that the only option available is to copy the file to some temp directory, revert the changes, update the workspace and copy the file into the new location in the workspace.
AccuRev will at least tell you which files you have to copy since they will be marked as modified.
I could experimentally verify David's remark to step 9 using AccuRev 5.5.
Let's assume that in the workspace of user A the file was moved and the move was promoted, while in the workspace of user B the file was modified and user B is about to promote his/her change.
Before the file is kept, it will not be possible for user B neither to merge nor to update. But after keeping the modified file the update is possible. The file is first marked as overlap, then the merge succeeds in the new location. Basically, this avoids creating a copy of the file, reverting it and restoring it in the new location after an update, which can be quite cumbersome, as AccuRev does not reveal easily where the move goes.
If user B promotes the modification before user A promotes the move, all goes smoothly, i.e. on update the moved file appears as overlap, but easily merges into the moved file in the new location.
Similar results are obtained when the two users have workspaces connected to different streams and the overlap occurs on a common parent stream. Only if the file is unkept, an error can occur (i.e. only if the move is promoted before the change). Then a simple keep allows to proceed as usual (update, merge, then promote).

Accurev - why not Auto-Update?

Why isn't it standard behavior for Accurev to automatically run an "Update" upon opening the program? "Update" updates a user's local sandbox with the latest files from the building/promoted area.
It seems like expected functionality that the most recent files should be synchronized first.
I'm not claiming that it should always update, but curious as to why an auto-Update wouldn't be correct.
Auto-updating could produce some very unwanted results.
Take this scenario: you're in the middle of a development task, but you've made a mistake and need to revert a file that you just modified. So you open AccuRev, but before you have a chance to "revert to most recent version", you are bombarded with 100 files that have been changed upstream including the one you want to revert. You are now forced into the position of resolving all the merge conflicts before your solution will build, including the merge of your (possibly unstable) code in progress.
Requiring the user to manually update keeps a protective 'bubble' around the developer, allowing them to commit (keep) changes within their own workspace without bringing down code changes that could destabilise the work in their sandbox. When the developer gets to a point where his code is ready to share with others, that is the appropriate time to do an update and subsequently build/retest the merged codebase before promoting.
However there is one scenario that I do believe auto-updating could be useful: after a workspace is reparented. i.e. when a developer's workspace is moved from one part of the stream hierarchy to another. Every time we reparent we have to do a little dance:
Accept the confirmation dialog that reminds us (rather verbosely) that we need to update our workspace before we can promote any changes.
Double-click the workspace to view its files.
Wait for AccuRev to do a "Pending" search, to determine whether any file changes are waiting to be committed.
And finally, perform the Update.
Instead of just giving us a confirmation dialog, it would be nice if AccuRev could just ask us if we want to Update immediately.
I guess it depends on preference. I for one wouldn't like the auto-update feature.
Imagine you have a huge project and you don't want to build it every time you start Accurev. But you also can't debug because the source files and debugging info no longer correspond.

Undo an Update in AccuRev?

How do I undo an update in Accurev? I want to revert to a state where contents of the files are exactly how it was before an "update" operation?
There are numerous ways to change the contents in your workspace to reflect an earlier configuration. Based on the limited description where you reference "all the files under CM", I'll make the assumption that you want to roll back your entire workspace as opposed to a select few files.
Question: does everyone parented by the same stream as your workspace want to roll back, or just you? If it's everyone, you can change the time basis of that parent stream to reflect the specific point in time you want to revert to. Once that is done, run Update, and you're good. If it's just you and it's more than a small sampling of files, I'd suggest creating a personal time-based stream, setting the time to when you want, and re-parenting your workspace to it:
Current_parent -- New_personal_time_stream -- your_workspace
There are other options as well if you just want to deal with a few select files, but it seems like this is what you're after...
Cheers,
~James