Make Name Mapping mergeable

[simon_glet]

Hi,

A Name Mapping file is an xml file but its content is difficult to understand and impossible to merge. The current structure forces teams working on the same project to dedicate one personne only to edit the Name Mapping file. Once the editing is done, other members of the project must overwrite their local file.

The must be a better way to keep the Name Mapping file in synch.

Thanks

Simon Glet

[mfoster711]

I agree. There has to be a better way. One idea, we use WinMerge to view/compare the differences in our script files between two projects. WinMerge brings up a window that lets you view the differences of each file side by side and you can go through them and update in either direction. Name mapping needs something like this. A side by side comparison that allows you to merge differences in either direction.

[brook_grewcock]

If Test Complete stopped putting unique IDs on everything, that would enable much better merging. Even under Subversion.

[simon_glet]

In any case, there are quite a few "New feature Request" about the NameMapping. That clearly indicates the feature is used but needs improvement. Will these requests qualify as new features?

Let's hope their status will soon change to "Selected for Developement".

[mfoster711]

When was this implemented? What version of TestComplete?

[Dmitry_Nikolaev]

Hello,

The Name Mapping file format has been changed in TestComplete version 11.30. This was an experiment that should allow us to check whether the new file format can be merged by source control merging tools. We collected feedback and found that the new format is significantly better than the old one and now the Name Mapping file can be merged by various tools. I would like to note older versions of the Team Foundation Version Control merge tool may work not very good, but my personal investigation shows that this tool shipped along with VS version 2015 works much better.

Of course, there can be conflicts that should be resolved manually. However, they can be resolved while the old format did not allow this at all. Moreover, taking into account that Name Mapping has the tree structure, it is difficult to imagine a solution that never produces conflicts in teamwork environment.

So, we think that the new format resolves the problem with merging changes of the Name Mapping file and we will use the new format for the rest project files in future.