Committing and Synchronizing in a Single-Bound Model

If you are working in a single-bound model (see Single-Bound Projects), you author content in Flare. When you want to transfer your changes to Central, you must commit and synchronize the changes.

Permission Required?

For this activity, you must have the following permission settings:

For more information about permissions, see Setting User Permissions or Setting Team Permissions.

Commit

Commit

To commit a changed file is to record it to the local repository. Essentially you are saying, “I’m ready to transfer this content up to the cloned project on Central.” Committing files gives you the opportunity to organize them into different groups when you add them to Central. You can also add a unique comment to each commit.

Example You’ve made changes to 23 files in your Flare project. Maybe 17 of the files are related to Feature A that you are documenting and the other 6 are related to Feature B.

Suppose your company policy is that you must add a comment each time you upload changes and provide a summary of what you did. To keep the summary for Feature A separate from Feature B, you decide to do two commits.

First, you use the Pending Changes window pane in Flare to select the 17 changed files related to Feature A. Then you perform the commit and add a relevant comment.

After this, you select the 6 changed files related to Feature B and perform another commit with a different comment.

How to Commit Files in a Single-Bound Project

  1. Open the project in MadCap Flare and make your changes.

    Note If you are using Git branching, make sure the appropriate branch is active. When you commit the changes, it will be for that branch. See Branching.

  2. Do one of the following, depending on the part of the user interface you are using:

    • Status Bar In the lower-right of Flare, click (a number indicates how many files contain changes that need to be committed).

      Note If you do not see this option, make sure View > Status Bar is enabled.

    • Pending Changes Window Pane From the Source Control ribbon, open the Pending Changes window pane. Select the files in the window pane that you want to commit, and in the local toolbar click Commit button.
    • Ribbon Select Source Control > Commit (for selected files) or Source Control > Commit All (for all files in the project).
    • Right-Click If you have the Content Explorer, Project Organizer, Pending Changes window pane, or File List open, right-click the file you want to commit and select Source Control > Commit (for selected files) or Source Control > Project > Commit All (for all files in the project).

    The Commit dialog opens. The selected files are listed with check boxes next to them.

  3. Enter a comment tied to the commit. This enables you to keep an audit trail for a file. The comment can then be viewed from the History dialog, which can be accessed from the Source Control Explorer, the Source Control ribbon, or the Source Control button Source Control drop-down button.
  4. Click Commit.

Synchronize

Synchronize

To synchronize means to pull, then push, committed changes between the cloned Central project and your local Flare project. This allows you to retrieve changes that other writers have uploaded to Central from their local projects, and they can get your changes as well. You cannot synchronize changes from Central, but you can from Flare.

How to Synchronize Files in a Single-Bound Project

It is possible to use the Pull and Push options in the Flare interface individually to synchronize your files, but it is more convenient to use the Synchronize option instead. Flare will first pull changes from the project on Central. After that, it will push changed files from the local project up to Central.

  1. Do one of the following in the Flare project, depending on the part of the user interface you are using.

    Note If you are using Git branching, make sure the appropriate branch is active. When you synchronize files, it will be for that branch.See Branching.

    • Status Bar In the lower-right of Flare, click (a number indicates how many commits need to be pushed or pulled).

      Note If you do not see this option, make sure View > Status Bar is enabled.

    • Ribbon Select Source Control > Synchronize.

    • Right-Click If you have the Content Explorer, Project Organizer, Pending Changes window pane, or File List open, right-click any file and select Source Control > Project > Synchronize.

  2. (Optional) If you did not commit your files before starting the synchronize, a dialog asks if you want to commit your files. Click Yes to continue.

    Note You must commit all modified files to proceed with the synchronization.

  3. In the Select Remote for Synchronize dialog, select the remote repository (if necessary) and click OK. If you are using a dual-bound setup, origin is typically the name of the repository for the first binding, and MadCapCentral is the name for the Central binding.

    If no conflicts were discovered during the synchronization, you do not need to continue with the following steps; you are finished.

    If conflicts were found (i.e., a remote file is different from the version in your local repository), the Resolve Conflicts dialog opens. Continue with the following steps.

  4. Do one of the following:
    • If you want to accept all of the differences between the remote and local files, thus merging them, click Auto Merge All. If this step is a success, you do not need to continue with these steps.
    • If you want to review the differences in the files side by side and resolve each conflict (or if auto-merging is not possible due to conflicts occurring in the same location in a file), click Resolve. The Resolve Version Conflict dialog opens.
  5. From the Resolve Version Conflict dialog you can choose from the following options:
    • Merge changes in merge tool Opens a merging interface, which lets you see exactly what changes were made and choose which to keep.
    • Undo my local changes Automatically removes your changes and keeps changes from other authors.
    • Discard external changes Automatically removes changes from other authors and keeps your changes.
  6. If you selected the option to use the merge tool, the Merge Changes dialog opens. Use this dialog to view and select changes. You can take actions in the following ways.

    • Click a Change Use the key at the top of the dialog, as well as the color coding on the local and server sides, to determine if a change has been added (new), deleted, changed, moved, or is in conflict (difference occur in the same paragraph). For conflicts in the same paragraph (i.e., areas where a diagonal line is shown), you can click the icon next to either the local or server change and choose Keep Change. This will copy that change to the text area at the bottom of the dialog.

    • Type Content If you want to use your changes as well as those from another author, and even tweak the paragraph a bit more, you can click in the area at the bottom of the dialog and simply type content.
    • Previous/Next Conflict When you are finished resolving the first conflict, you can use the "Previous Conflict" and "Next Conflict" buttons at the bottom of the dialog to work on other conflicts in the file.
  7. After all conflicts have been resolved, click OK. A message lets you know that a backup of the file has been created in case you need to roll back to it. Click OK.
  8. Click OK in any remaining dialogs.
  9. Because you encountered conflicts, your changes were not pushed up to Central. Therefore, click the Synchronize option again to complete the process.

What’s Noteworthy?

Note From the Projects page, you can view the files and commit history for a project. See Viewing Project Files.