About Version Control

Versioning control gives the user the ability to view, maintain and navigate back to older versions through history, documentation, and checkpoints. Decisions has built-in audit mechanisms that save every change that is made. The versioning capabilities that Decisions has available include, making copies and templates, importing/ exporting options as well as a designer repository.

History, Documentation, & Checkpoints

The History feature gives the User the ability to find work from a specific time and date. When a  flow is opened, the history is automatically stored. The designer can roll back the history to view changes that have been made for the purpose of making any necessary corrections or to view and analyze an old error. There are multiple ways to find this history/documentation in Decisions.

History can also be recalled through a manually created checkpoint. Checkpoints are defined by the user to capture and define a specific point in time. This feature allows you to define a point in time that you may want to revert back to at a later date. The difference between a checkpoint and a normal auto-save is that you give checkpoints a specific name and define the time that you want to capture.

Making Copies and Templates

Copy a Flow Items
In the design studio, copies can be created to duplicate an exact copy of an item. There are two methods to copy items in Decisions. The first method is to copy a single item. When a Flow is being copied it is important to view the contents of the Flow to make sure that it does not have dependencies. For example, if a Form is used inside a flow, the copy of the flow will point to the original form. That means that if the Form is changed within the copied flow then it will alter the original Form. If a copy of the form is needed then that Form will also need to be copied separately, and remapped in the copy of the flow. The original flow can continue to run as long as it is needed and changes can be made to the new copied flow.

Copy Designer Folder Action
The second method of copying allows the User to copy an entire Folder and everything in it. This method respects the relationships of all items being copied so that no remapping is needed. In the case of the previous example, the flow and form would both be copied and the copied form would automatically be mapped in the copied flow.

Creating a Template is similar to creating a copy. A Template will also create a copy that can be stored as a Step or as a designer option. This feature allows flows, rules, and steps to be saved and then used again and again. When a template is created that template will now be saved and can be viewed and selected to use as a designer option. This option is useful to set up a pre-configured flow that will be used multiple times as a starting point or to save configurations on a step that requires a lot of set up.

Import/Export Options

Decisions offers the ability to import and export a single item or an entire project. This feature allows the User to move things within Decisions from one environment to another. This enables the user to save different versions of a project. When a project is imported or exported they are saved into a zip file.

Note: An export contains the configuration of a project at the time the export was made. As changes are made to a project after the project has been exported, a new export will be needed to reflect those changes, or make the changes manually to update the file.

Designer Repository

The designer repository is a separate installation of decisions. After the installation, navigate to settings and turn on the Repository setting in Decisions. This is a specialized file server that stores all of the exported files of various projects,  that have been created in Decisions. The Repository stores the files and it also keeps track of the history of every version of a project that has ever been uploaded to the repository. When changes are made to a project, and then uploaded to the repository. The repository must be turned on within the settings in Decisions.