AccuRev Online Help

AccuRev documentation often uses the term active to describe the elements that are members of
the default group.
2. Improving the performance of the non-member search.
To improve performance, timestamp and pathname optimizations enable Update to avoid
examining every file in the workspace tree.
3. Anchor-required workspaces and exclusive file locking.
By default, AccuRev allows you to edit any file in a workspace at any time -- it doesn't require
you to perform a "check out" operation on a file before editing it. This provides convenience and
flexibility, but the edited files (with "non-member" status) can abort an Update. You can use the
anchor-required workspace and/or exclusive file locking feature to ensure files never get "nonmember"
status, thus guaranteeing that Update will always proceed. See “File Locking” on
page 255.
4. Determining which elements need to be updated: performance note.
This step is efficient and speedy. Update needs to consider only the elements that were involved in
transactions recorded since the workspace's previous update. Only these transactions can contain
changes that have not yet been incorporated into the workspace.
Transferring Data from the Repository
Update next applies both content changes and namespace changes to elements in the workspace:
• It applies content changes to file elements by copying the backing-stream versions from the
repository to the workspace tree. For (modified)(overlap)-status files, it merges the backingstream
version with the file in the workspace tree.
• It handles namespace changes to file and directory elements by creating, removing, renaming,
and/or moving objects in the workspace tree.
Recording the Update
After it has completed the updating of versions in the workspace, Update changes the values of
two workspace parameters:
• scan threshold: the more recent this value, the more effective the timestamp optimization used
both by Update and by certain File Browser searches.
• update level: after an update, the workspace is "up to date as of transaction N "; N is the
workspace's update level. The higher this value, the fewer transactions your next invocation of
Update will need to examine, in order to determine which elements need to be updated.
When Update does not Work
Sometimes AccuRev is not able to complete an Update operation, typically because a file cannot
be overwritten due to permissions, or because it is open in another application. In this case, you
30 AccuRev ® On-Line Help Guide