When you create a new release of a key Domino application, it’s important to provide a comprehensive set of release notes detailing all the changes in the new version of the app. If you’re using Teamstudio CIAO! for version control, you may not be aware that there is a report that CIAO! can produce that will help you with that task. It’s called the Change Report.
The purpose of the Change Report is to list out everything that’s changed in the application design between one version and the next. If you’ve created meaningful check in comments as you’ve made changes in the design, this report can virtually do the work of writing your release notes for you. Here’s how to create the Change Report.
Once you’ve made the version that you are planning to release that has all the changes in it, open the CIAO! user interface and select Reports\Create Change Report from the File menu.
Select the range of versions that you want to include in the report, by choosing the starting label and the label of the version that you just created. You have the option to pick how much detail is included in the report, including the name of the person that made each change as well as their comment and the date of the check-in. You can also include a detailed analysis of the actual changes that were made to each individual design element.
The output from the report will be written to the Teamstudio Reports database. This is a database that is used as a collecting point for a few different types of output from the Teamstudio tools. You don’t have to use the same reports database for all your Teamstudio report output, you can create a new database as long as it has the design of the output database, TMSLogs.ntf.
Once the report has been created, you can open the report database and navigate to the CIAO Reports\Change List view:
You’ll see a list of all the design elements that have changed. To drill down and see more detail, double-click on one of the design elements:
If you selected the option “Include Difference”, here is where you will see the detailed analysis of the changes that have been made to the element between the two versions. Typically, if the comments have been completed correctly, this would not be necessary. But sometimes it is!
And that’s it! This little-known feature of CIAO! can be used to help with creating release notes, but also of course you can use it to create an audit trail of the changes that have been made between application versions when perhaps your documentation is not completely up to scratch.
If you have questions about this, or any aspect of using Teamstudio CIAO! to help control versioning of your HCL Domino apps, click below to start a conversation. We love to chat!