Version control of Flexsim model

Has anybody thought of version control of the Flexsim model? A few good and free version control tools are available on the internet, for example, CVS and SubVersion. However, these are basically good at comparing text files. Since Flexsim can import and export XML model, which is a text file, we could apply version control tools to the Flexsim XML model. Version control is very useful if multiple people working on the same model, or even one person but having many model versions. Just want to know if anyone has used version control or XML models in Flexsim and he/she may be able to share some experiences.

Thanks.
Alan

Alan,

We use tortoise VCS when building user libraries. But that only works good for all .h and .cpp files and for instance media files that are not changed regularly. For Libraries it is still a bit of a pain because we don't save libraries in text/xml format (we might test that 1 time). For models it is the same as with libraries I guess.

The advantage is simply that you have everything together and for the .h and .cpp files it works excellent.

Steven

Steven,

Good to know that you are using TortoiseCVS (I guess it is CVS). I never used CVS system before, but used TotoriseSVN. I think both tools are good.

I may do some experiment on Flexsim XML model too.

Thanks.
Alan

Before we had XML, we lost a software sale to Northrup Grumman once because they were determined they needed to use version control software among their simulation modelers. We use CVS for the Flexsim software development.

Why XML model is so big? I just create a very simple model with only one source, one queue, one processor, and one sink. It is already more than 3 MB. Do not know what negative effects could be if using version control on these huge files. But certainly it would be hard to read and compare the xml file to incorporate changes from different versions or different users in SubVersion.

Alan

Alan,

I checked and we use TortoiseSVN. Very handy is incorporated in the windows popup menu etc.

Concerning this large size, I think this is the same as with an Autocad drawing, if you export it to DXF. The problem is that everything has to be described by using text. So you need a lot of text. The advantage is that if you zip it,it becomes very small (I think)

I have no idea how SVC or CVS handles it. Testing would be the only solution here I guess

Steven

Dear all,

I am currently trying to use the XML functionality but it does not work. When I choose "File | XML Files | Save XML Model", I get a file dialog, but there is no possibility to choose ".xml". Just "Flexsim Model" and "Tree".

Can anybody help me?

Many thanks in advance,
Lydia.

In 4.5.2, that menu option saves an xml file with the extension fsm. You can view the contents and see that it is ASCII XML instead of binary data using a text editor like Notepad. The "Open XML Model" also allows you to browse for xml Flexsim models (fsm extension).

We overhauled the xml system that Flexsim 4.5.2 used in 5.0. In Flexsim 5, when you save an xml file, it saves it with a .fsx extension and it follows a different schema. This is done through normal save/open dialogs rather than a special xml menu.

Do you still use TortoiseSVN? Because I see so in the manual but somewhere I saw you migrated to Mercurial. I am trying this feature now but I wanted to know which one you think is best.
Thanks

I'm using TortoiseHg and it works very well. Mercurial is included in the installation. You can download it from http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.org/

If you use Visual Studio you can also install an Visual Studio plugin called VisualHg. You find more information about at this website: http://visualhg.codeplex.com/

We also switched over to TortoiseHG and are very happy in comparison with SVN. Merging c++ is so much easier and actually works. Merging models, even with using filemaps, does not always work as expected.

Versioning/differencing seems to be the biggest advantage of saving to FlexSim's XML format (.fsx).

Have you ever needed to view the saved .fsx file in a more human-readable format? Has anyone created an XSLT stylesheet to transform the .fsx file into an easy-to-read HTML file? Or come up with another solution?

Thanks -