Making and recommending baselines in HCL VersionVault Express

In this article we’ll describe how to create and recommend Unified Change Management baselines using HCL VersionVault Express. You must have the Builder role in VersionVault Express to perform these operations. (See the Roles Blog, for more information on roles in VersionVault Express.)

UCM baseline basics 

A baseline specifies a version of each directory and file in a project and represents a snapshot of the project at any given time. Generally, a Builder is responsible for creating a baseline at times when the code base is known to be in a good state, such as after a successful build and test cycle. You can create a Full baseline, which explicitly marks every directory and file in the project, or an Incremental baseline, which marks only the directory or file versions that have changed since the last baseline was created. It may be faster to create an Incremental baseline, but Developers may experience better performance when looking at activity changesets from a Full baseline.

Creating a baseline

To create a baseline on a stream, as Builder go to the stream’s page and click the “New baseline” button. You must enter a name for the new baseline, and you may also enter an optional description. Then select “Incremental” or “Full” and click “Create.”

Recommending a baseline

Once you’ve created any baseline, you can recommend it. A stream’s recommended baseline becomes the default choice for rebase operations in its existing child streams and also the foundation baseline of new child streams. The foundation baseline represents the stream’s current known state of the project. A new child stream has as its foundation the recommended baseline of its parent stream. When you rebase a stream, its foundation is set to the baseline used during the rebase. (See the Introduction to VV concepts Blog, for more information.)

To recommend a baseline, as Builder go to the stream’s page and then click the down-arrow (↓*) to the left of the name of the baseline you wish to recommend.

Summary 

VersionVault Express make baseline and recommend baseline operations enable Developers to use a common snapshot of the project as the starting point for their work. For more information see our blog site.