Rational Rhapsody Tip #48 - Pessimistic Locking and Rhapsody Model Manager 6.0.6 (Advanced)

I've been really busy recently with customer-work. However, I have put together an 11 minute video on something that seems to come up a lot in initial conversations about the great new model-management capability provided in IBM Rational Rhapsody 8.3.1 with Rhapsody Model Manager 6.0.6 (the IBM Jazz/architecture management application). One of the first questions a lot of people have when it comes to file-based model management is whether it is possible to lock files so that other users cannot edit them at the same time? The goal being to remove the need to merge changes with Rhapsody's DiffMerge tool.

By default RTC and RMM both have a very modern optimistic strategy towards changes. That is they won't lock files. In fact, there is no check-out par say, rather RMM/RTC track changes to the files automatically and group them into changesets. Changesets are nifty for a number of reasons. In this video, however, I show that it is possible to change the strategy to pessimistic if you want. To do this you can configure the stream to auto-lock files so they are read-only. This forces the user to have to change the read/write status in order to make changes and this change of status can be used to lock the file so that nobody else can edit them. When a deliver is then made, then the lock can be released. In this way a pessimistic approach can be taken. This video includes demo of this with Rational Rhapsody 8.3.1 (iFix2) and Rhapsody Model Manager 6.0.6. 

















File-based model management is extremely powerful for a number of reasons. Firstly, it means that people are able to work effectively on client side in isolation (this is essential when doing work that involves compilation/simulation). It's also an efficient way to transfer information from the client to server when working in parallel as merges can be handled on the client side without needing to add or remove data from large database tables.