Version control is the concept of managing and keeping track of any changes to a record, file, document or, in the context of Genovo, a report. It works on the basis that when any changes are made to the entity in question, these changes are saved within a new version of the entity. This helps to track the progress of each update, clearly identify any changes that have been made in each version. It also provides an audit trail of the changes that have been made to the entity up to the point it is finalised.
Within Genovo, as Writer and Reader users interact with a report, it is possible to save any changes they make to the Report Editor report as a different version.
By default, Genovo's Report Editor offers a simple version control, by assigning version numbers to newly created, or edited reports. This helps to provide an indication of the amount of interactions that have occurred / edits that have been made to a report version. However, it is worth highlighting that it will not provide a history of all the edits that have been made to that version - previous versions of the reports are not preserved.
'Major' versions of a Report Editor report for newly-created reports
As a Writer user, having built the report within the Report Builder and clicking Create / edit report for the first time, the report will automatically open in the Report Editor and be assigned the version number 1.0.
Having created Version 1.0, if a Writer user subsequently clicks Create / edit report in the Report Builder of that report, they will be prompted whether they wish to open the most recent version (in this example 1.0) or create a new version i.e. Version 2.0. If you have made any changes to the report in the Report Builder since the last version was created, you are going to want to create a new version with all the additional content / changes you have made included.
'Minor' versions of a Report Editor report for edits to existing reports
Having created a Report Editor version of a report, both Writer and Reader users can open that version and save the edits they make to it. Every time they do, the current version number of that report will automatically update by a decimal point e.g. Version 1.0 will become Version 1.1 on save and then Version 1.2 on a subsequent edit and save, and so on....
Cloning a report version to keep a full audit trail of changes
To implement a comprehensive system of version control and keep a full audit trail of the changes that have been made to a report, your Writer and Reader users will need to create a new version of the Report Editor report every time they edit the report. This is easily achieved by cloning the previous version of the Report Editor report. Every time a Report Editor report is cloned, it creates an exact copy of the previous version as a new 'major' version and given an incremental version number of 1 - further edits can then be made to the new version, whilst leaving the previous version intact.