Managing branches and snapshots
Using branches and snapshots, you can manage multiple development efforts.
Overview
The following figure shows process apps, case solutions, and snapshots:
For more information about the project types, such as process apps, case solutions, and toolkits, see Workflow projects.
| Content type | Description |
|---|---|
| Branches | Optional subdivisions in a project based on team tasks or project versions. You can determine if additional branches are necessary for each project and, if so, enable them at any time. Branches are supported only for process apps and toolkits, not case solutions. |
| Snapshots | Record the state of the items within a project or branch at a specific point in time. From Workflow Center, you can create snapshots of your projects. You can also deploy particular snapshots of your projects on the servers in development, test, staging, and production environments. |
On Workflow Server, there is one snapshot that is marked as default for each project. This snapshot is used to start instances when a process, case, or service is run and a specific snapshot is not provided.
- In Workflow Center, the current (tip) snapshot is a special snapshot context that is the most current version of any artifact in the branch of a process app or toolkit.
- Each branch is a parallel version of a process app or toolkit, and each branch has a current snapshot.
- The current (tip) snapshot is used to run instances when a project is running and a specific snapshot is not provided. If you don't want an instance to run on the current snapshot, you must select a specific snapshot.
- When a prject is started for a current (tip) snapshot, any changes that are made to the current snapshot are visible to that instance or service during its execution.
- If a specific snapshot is used to start an instance or a service, changes to the project are not visible to that instance when it is running. If the specific snapshot is the current snapshot, the instance continues on the specific snapshot even if the current snapshot changes.
Creating and maintaining high-level library items
See the following topics to learn how to create and maintain projects, branches, and snapshots:
| Task | Description |
|---|---|
| Managing projects | Create and maintain containers where business process management (BPM) analysts and developers can develop process models and underlying implementations. Using toolkits, enable users to share library items across projects. |
| Designing your case management solution | Identify what user activities are needed to accomplish the main user goal. Decide what business-level activities and steps you need, and then group those activities and steps into a case. |
| Managing branches | Create subdivisions in projects to enable development of separate versions of the same application in Process Designer. |
| Managing snapshots | Capture and save the items in a project or branch of a process app or toolkit at specific points in time and remove snapshots that are no longer in use. |
Housekeeping tasks in Workflow Center
Workflow Center holds snapshots of projects as they are developed. Every named (versioned) snapshot that you create in Process Designer is saved in Workflow Center. In addition, every time you save work in Process Designer, an unnamed snapshot is saved in Workflow Center. These snapshots accumulate, so you should periodically delete unneeded snapshots. You can configure Workflow Center to automatically delete unnamed snapshots that you no longer need to keep on the server.
You can archive projects and snapshots. Archiving in Workflow Center does not move the artifact to a secondary location; it only removes it from displaying in the UI views. To remove a project or snapshot from the system, archive it, and then delete it.