I got this message the other day stating that SVN support is going away in a future release:
I understand wanting to move to your own platform, however there are many companies that do not allow assets to be stored in the cloud. If the feature is removed then companies who will not be moving to VPository will have to use external tools for source control, but will lose features like diffs in the process.
So I ask, at the very least, offer a plugin or some means to make up for the features that are planned to be removed.
We also won’t store our visual paradigm projects in the cloud based VPository.
Also it is not suitable to build a separate version control system just for visual paradigm.
Sad to hear that the team capabilities will be dropped.
Until last year we were using the svn-team support from visual paradigm. It was the perfect fit for us since our students (we are using the product in academia) were supposed to work with svn for collaboration. Obviously the cloud-solution is no proper replacement since the course is not about VP only, but deals with other documents as well. Additionally I as a teacher need to have control about the submissions, so having this in somebody elses cloud is not usable either.
For us the SVN-support is one of the major features provided by VP. As others we will not store any project files on external servers or cloud based. Now we consider to stay on VP version 12 or setting up a GIT repository…
Sad!
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand I obviously agree; it’s never nice to see certain functionality get removed from a program which you frequently use. And I also fully agree with the given arguments: sometimes it’s simply not feasible to utilize an external cloud-based storage or service.
But having said that I also think it’s fair to note that VP is doing their best and they’re not merely providing the same kind of functionality: they’re taking it a lot further. I’ve been experimenting with VPository for a while now (freely available as a VP user) and I’m seriously loving it. I’ll be honest: one of the reasons is also because thanks to VPository I can now use certain Agile functionality in VP even though I have a Modeler license, that is huge for me: actually gaining access to project management features (but VP Professional still sits on my wishlist :D).
But guys… I assume we’re all IT professionals here, at least VP enthusiasts, right? VP has provided plugin functionality for quite some time already. Now… I don’t know for sure what functionality the Open API exactly provides (I’m working on that) but surely us users can do something for ourselves here?
Note: there’s not much there right now (time of writing) other than the readme. But I opened a github repository and I’m planning on working on a VP plugin which might be able to provide us with some basic SVN functionality. I am aware of Java libraries which provide this functionality, I also know that a plugin can manifest itself on the plugin tab within VP and since it’s written in Java you basically have a lot of functionality at your disposal (so I assume).
Surely we should be able to get something started here?
I took my project file apart and learned that a VPP file is basically an SQLite datafile. Pure SQL code in ASCII format, I made an ERD diagram (obviously 8)) and attached it.
If you’re interested to help out let me know. For obvious reasons the project will be divided in two parts… Github will host the source code, provide basic bug tracking functionality and a simple website / wiki for background information. But VPository will be used for the project management capabilities.
