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william_roe's avatar
william_roe
Super Contributor
11 years ago

Merging Name Mapping Across Machines

We recently "graduated" from a single test designer to having multiple designers on multiple machines and a dedicated test server. The project suite and project files are on the designer's local machine pointing to Keyword tests and spreadsheet (read-only) are on the test server. We are struggling desperately to keep the name mappings synced. For example, several new keyword tests were created on the server today which included new mappings and a few edited mappings. However, when adding the existing keyword tests to our designer's desktop and merging the name mapping ON THE LOCAL MACHINE these tests were unable to find the objects or found the wrong object. As a last ditch effort I replaced the name mapping file completely on my local machine and it works. The attached dialogue shows with EVERY merge and not aware of what should be done to identify and resolve the conflicts. We are initiating the merge from the desktop machine according to the article (http://support.smartbear.com/viewarticle/55712/). Can someone help us figure out what is happening or techniques for validating the results?

 

Version 10.50.2702.7

 

Merging Name Conflict.JPG

  • jmcpeek's avatar
    jmcpeek
    Contributor
    11 years ago

    I'd be interested in this as well. We were originally going to have multiple test designers, but the name mapping issue quickly became troublesome and we went with a single designer. We were hoping that the talk about changes with namemapping in 10.4 (I believe) would resolve the problem. It would be disheartening to find out the problem with merging namemapping files still exists.

    • william_roe's avatar
      william_roe
      Super Contributor
      11 years ago

      We have more test than a single designer can maintain and were sold that TestComplete supported this. We are using 10.5 and not 100% convinced it's a problem with TestComplete but seems to be. 

       

      My understanding is it's more of an import than a merge so if changes were made on a centralized file server the designers would merge (import) from the server and all would current. Likeway, when changes are made on the designers desktop the reverse would apply. Is this how you understand it to work?

      • jmcpeek's avatar
        jmcpeek
        Contributor
        11 years ago

        Our expectation was that it would work similarly to a code repository merge. When the merge is requested, new, unconflicting changes are imported, while conflicting changes require some reconcilliation. What we found was that because of the plumbing of the namemapping xml (GUIDs seem to be (at least occassionally) unique to the machine that mapped the object), the same object mapped the same way but from 2 different machines resulted in either 2 mapped objects, or no mapped objects after a merge. 

         

        We have more than one (me) designer now, but most of the work is maintenance and not needing to map new objects. But in the near future we're going to have our QA team designing tests, so I hope the namemapping issue we ran into with 9.4 doesn't still exist in 10.5.