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Concepts > Versioning > Editing Workflows
Cyclical Version Tree

Many projects evolve through a prescribed or regulated group of stages that require engineering, administrative, or legal approval before proceeding to the next stage. For example, within the utility domain, common project stages include working, proposed, accepted, construction, and as built. This particular process is essentially cyclical; a work order is initially assigned to an engineer and modified over time as the project evolves through the various stages before full integration with the production database.

In this approach, a version is created to represent each stage of this process: initial design or proposal, an approved version, and a version for the construction phase. As the project advances through the project milestones, each stage is reviewed and approved then superseded by the next version until the last stage is reached and completed. The older versions may be maintained for historical reference or deleted as required.

Once the project is complete, the constructed version can be reconciled with and posted directly to the DEFAULT version, without having to reconcile and post with the previous versions in the lineage.

Pros

  • Suitable for projects that evolve through a series of stages, where each stage must be isolated as a distinct unit of work.
  • As with all other multiple-tier configurations, this workflow allows editors to develop proposals and design alternatives without affecting the production database.
  • Changes can be posted directly to DEFAULT, which eliminates the overhead of progressively posting changes up the version tree to the DEFAULT version.

Cons

  • Not suitable for batch reconcile and post processes, because any implementation would require a great deal of application logic to determine which versions to reconcile and post.
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