MadCap Software Forums

Hi, My group is testing Flare 11 for possible migration to it from a different authoring tool. One must have requirement is source control, and I am testing Subversion. I have been able to get files in and out of an SVN repo, but it is slow on our network. I have this working externally from Flare with the Tortoise SVN client, but I think we ultimately want to use the functionality built into Flare. I finally was able to bind my project to the SVN repo, but when I try to commit files, it seems to work but keeps throwing an error that says it is not a working copy. I am not sure what that means. Can anyone shed some light on this? Also, this binding seems to be extremely slow too. Is that normal?

If you want to use Flare's native Subversion feature, you must bind the project to the SVN repo using Flare, not using TortoiseSVN. In my experience, that's the desirable approach because Flare has been programmed to bind only the necessary source files (those being things in the Content folder, the Project folder [except for one folder; more on this in a sec], and the .flprj file) and to ignore everything else (that being the Analyzer folder, Output folder, and the Project\Users folder). You certainly can use TortoiseSVN to do the binding, but you need to be sure to set up an ignore list so that you don't end up with stuff bound that should not be bound. (More on this here: http://webhelp.madcapsoftware.com/flare ... ontrol.htm, especially the section "Which files can be included in the integrated source control?" subsection "If including files manually in your source control client".)

In my experience, Flare's Subversion integration is rather finicky; yes, binding a project from within Flare can seem to take a very long time. My advice is to be patient and let Flare work. Eventually it will come back to life and you then see a big file listing go flying by. Once the Flare project is in the repo, then other Flare users can create a new project by importing from source control and pointing to the URL where the project is stored in the SVN repo. In SVN-speak, this is known as acquiring a working copy. A "working copy" means the copy of the bound project, stored on a computer, into which updates from the repo can be read in and changes made can be committed back to the repo. It's where the Flare author works.

You say that when you try to commit changes, you get an error saying that it's not a working copy. I can't say why this is because it's not clear to me what client (TortoiseSVN or Flare) did the initial binding and with what client are you trying to commit changes.

Finally, it's very important that both of your clients (TortoiseSVN and Flare) support the same SVN database structure. Flare 11 supports SVN 1.8.x, but the latest versions of TortoiseSVN are up to 1.9.x. Check this out on your computer. If the two clients aren't a match, then you should uninstall TortoiseSVN 1.9.x and instead install TortoiseSVN 1.8.x.

I hope all this helps. (And kindly forgive typos...)

Thank you, Nita, for the helpful overview and answer to my questions.

Hi Nita,
I hadn't even considered that we might be using an incompatible version of Tortoise SVN. We're on Flare 2018 r2 now. Do you know how I find out which version of Tortoise SVN we should be using?
Thanks,
-mdf

We don't use Flare's SVN implementation, so this might not be definitely the right version. We use version 1.9.5 build 27581 so you could give it a try.

Thanks for the info ChoccieMuffin!