Visual LANSA Forum

Just opening a thread for folks that are using LANSA environments with a VCS system (GIT/TFS).

Some pertinent questions.
Q1: How do you use your VCS for code comparisons and merges? Any issues/watchouts?
Q2: How do you manage development to QA source code and compiled object movements?
Q3: Work with an IBMi server in the mix?
Q4: Manage and use your Build server?
Q5: Organize and build deliveries to your targets?

More questions / discussions on the subject are welcome. Curious if folks are using such environments today and for what purpose?

Yes. I've worked on a large project that is VCS with an IBMi

This is using GitHub. This becomes the master repository. The IBMi is added as a Remote server, and instead of doing a Checkin, Checkout using Host Monitor you perform a Deliver To. It is one way, as you code base is Git not the IBMi.

LANSA on the client is quite magical as switching branches quickly updates the repository to that branches state. The only issue is it can't do that for server side(IBMi). So if you have a branch with server changes(table or code) then this can become problematic. For large changes it is recommended that a separate server install is created for that branch. Even though the project I'm working on covers an entire company, I've never had a change where that has been required.

Promotion for QA / Prod is a hard one to discuss as companies work different ways. Merge to a different branch or tagging are all options. It just depends on the requirements and how you have build servers configured.