PVCS® Change Manager™ for Oracle® - Synergex

TECHNICAL BRIEF
PVCS ® Change Manager for Oracle ®
Managing Home Grown and Third Party Developer Built Applications Safely and Efficiently
Introduction
For most companies today, purchasing an application built on Oracle Developer
technology does not completely fit the way they do business. About 20 percent or
more of the application will need to be customized. Some of these customizations
will be trivial and some will be significant. In any case, tracking these changes can
become a living nightmare for most developers. Merant PVCS Change Manager for
Oracle provides a full-featured product designed specifically to identify and track the
changes made for business critical practices. Many problems exist when
customizing these Applications, resulting in high company expenses due to
excessive development cost, costly application maintenance, lack of proper
documentation and ending with dissatisfied customers. Automated processes in
Change Manager reduce the cost of ownership and reduce the fear of customizing
the applications you’ve purchased.
Background
Oracle currently has more than 18,000 customers of its Oracle Developer
technology. While most of these customers work with the Oracle Applications,
many of them have either purchased a product or are building their own application
built on Oracle Developer technology.
Each custom application includes a myriad of forms, reports, libraries, and database
objects. The task of tracking, managing, documenting and migrating customizations,
from one environment to another can be burdensome. As it currently exists, this
situation means developers must sift laboriously through thousands of lines of code
to identify where these customizations are. Documentation is a difficult task with
Developer6i. Moreover, when Oracle introduces a new version of the application,
there are hundreds, if not thousands of changes from Oracle to implement and
manage as well. These changes all need to be identified and their impact on the
current environment determined.
With the new version of Oracle Developer, customers will discover that it has
become easier to inadvertently destabilize existing applications. A good example of
this would be when developers override inherited PL/SQL with their own debug
messages. This prevents further changes to the parent form from being inherited for
this object. Discovering where this problem occurs within the application can take a
significant amount of developer resources.

PVCS C H A N G E M A N A G E R F O R O R A C L E
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A P P L I C A T I O N S
Components
Change Finder
Object Finder
Automated Change Finder
Automated Generation
Automated Versioning
Automated Publishing
PVCS Change Manager for Oracle comprises six integrated components to improve
environment stability by automatically identifying change(s), assessing the impact of
the change(s), documenting them and notifying designated personnel about the
impact of the changes. Whether these changes originate with your own extensions
and customizations or are the result of updates, patches or new releases from Oracle,
PVCS Change Manager for Oracle speeds and automates the task.
Components of PVCS Change Manager for Oracle
Provides a comprehensive ability to interactively compare binary
files, such as forms, reports, menus, libraries, Dbase objects and
schemas. This is all done without converting the file from
binary to text files. Keeping the file in binary provides more
accurate and useable reports.
Provides a mean to perform comprehensive impact analysis for
scheduled changes to forms, reports, menus, libraries and
PL/SQL code
Monitors your Oracle Applications environment and automatically
tracks every change made. Provides reports on
customizations, version changes and Oracle changes (patches and
upgrades)
Automates the installation and generation of your custom
application code and database objects, for all of your Oracle
Environments throughout the entire software development
lifecycle
Maintains versioning as changes occur to any file type including
Oracle Applications software
Automated comprehensive documentation for all the Oracle
forms, reports, menus, libraries and PL/SQL code
Capabilities
Change Finder
The Change Finder module enables you to interactively compare any two files or
objects and quickly identify the difference or similarities. Note that we are not
simply differencing the text for a form, but rather comparing the file in its binary
format for each individual object within a form, subclassed (referenced) forms,
attached libraries and PL/SQL code. These reports will also identify inherited
properties that have been overwritten by a developer within a form. You can run the
Change Finder for Forms, Reports, Menus, Libraries, Text Files, Individual
Database Objects, and entire Database Schemas. The output reports will show all
changes in an easy-to-read format showing everything that has been Deleted, Added
or modified (including modified PL/SQL code). You will find the Change Finder
module fast and easy to use for resolving differences between environments or
comparing binary code and their dependencies.
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Object Finder
The Object Finder component determines what the affects of a scheduled change
will have. No more wondering, “If I make this change what will break”. As an
example, if you plan to change a form, Object Finder will tell you what forms are
dependent or subclassed (referenced) by that form. Object Finder will also identify
everything that attaches to a library and what objects are being used by what objects.
Object Finder also allows you to perform text string searches against all of you
forms, reports, menus, libraries and PL/SQL code all at one time, regardless of
where the files/scripts are located. Performing impact analysis is now very easy.
Automated Change Finder
Once configured, the Automated Change Finder Component is scheduled to monitor
your Oracle Applications environment(s) and automatically generate reports
whenever changes are made. By capturing change as change takes place, you won’t
experience any unscheduled (surprise) changes creating a more stable
environment(s).
When the “vanilla” Oracle Applications code is customized/extended and
subsequent releases are received, the Automated Change Finder will automatically
track the changes between the “vanilla” versions and your “custom” versions. You
will be able to see these changes immediately through online reports.
The Automated Change Finder produces three types of reports: Customizations,
Version Changes and Oracle Changes.
Customization reports identify everything that went into making the customization.
Documenting every deleted object, added object, modified properties within objects
and modified PL/SQL code.
Version Change reports show the changes that have taken place between revisions of
a given file.
Oracle Change Reports provide the industry’s deepest level of impact analysis,
showing the property/dependency level changes within your environment(s) to any
and all the objects made by an Oracle new releases or patch to their Applications
Software. At the same time Automated Change Finder will identify the impact of an
Oracle change against your customized/extended code.
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Oracle Reports identify all of the objects and object properties, including subclassed forms and
attached libraries that have changed.
Automated Generation
Automated Generation can interface with all major source code control (SCC)
systems to ensure that promoted database objects and program source code are
installed into your environments in the proper order in each environment thus
eliminating object dependency issues. All database objects can be installed, such as
tables, indexes, views, sequences, grants, synonyms, constraints, package
specifications, package bodies, functions, procedures, triggers, etc.
Custom Forms, Menus, Reports, and Libraries will automatically be installed and
generated as appropriate after database objects are installed. Subclassed (referenced)
Forms will also be automatically regenerated whenever needed. This ensures that all
software is installed correctly.
Assigned people will be automatically notified via email of installation status and of
any errors that occurred during installation. Any required generation or regeneration
will occur automatically to insure that all modules function correctly.
With Automated Generation, you will be able schedule code promotion without
monitoring installation scripts as they process in every environment. Automated
Generation also provides a way to automate scripts and programs you may be
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currently using for internal processes, such as shell scripts, C++ code, Pro C and/or
batch files.
Automated Versioning
Automated Versioning provides you with two methods of source control to maintain
versions of any file type(s). Because of its automation, Automated Versioning can
be setup either with formal file check-in, check-out or automated for transparent
source control.
Either way, you will have the added security that any time code changes occur it’s
captured with all changes documented. This is all done without requiring you to
change your existing environment(s), your tools or the way you work. With its
automation and transparency to the user, it reduces the chances of manual errors and
eliminates the inclination to create version control “work-arounds” when people are
in a hurry. Automated Versioning also makes it possible to schedule file promotions
to other environments, and it serves as a mechanism to recover previous versions in
the event problems occur.
With the Oracle 9i DBMS, Automated versioning offers the ability to version the
database objects as well.
Automated Publishing
The Automated Publishing feature offers comprehensive documentation of the
Oracle SQL scripts and Oracle Applications software including Forms, Menus,
Reports, and Libraries. Information in the Developer files (.fmb, .mmb, .olb .rdf,
.pll) and PL/SQL code is extracted into easy-to-read reports. Automated Publishing
reports mimic the hierarchical Object Navigator (Windows Explorer) type of listing,
which Developer uses as its main interface. Reports generated by Automated
Publishing will identify inherited properties that have been overwritten by a
developer.
Standard reports are designed to provide automated updated code documentation,
used for code review/walk through, another level of disaster recovery, and corporate
standardization security (it documents when corporate standards aren’t followed).
With this feature, operations and support staff can view the documentations in
multiple report formats. The report files can be emailed to anyone and enable them
to review documentation without having Oracle installed. Reports are automatically
created in every environment you define (dev, test, prod, etc.).
When to Use PVCS Change Manager for Oracle, Release 3.7.0.0
This release of the product is used to support the following Oracle environments:
Oracle Developer 1.x, 2.x, 4.x, 5.x and 6i
Oracle RDBMS 7.x, 8.x and 9i
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A P P L I C A T I O N S
FOR MORE INFORMATION
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info@merant.com
www.merant.com
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Copyright (c) 2002 Merant. All Rights Reserved.
Printed in the U.S.A. Merant and PVCS are
registered trademarks and PVCS Change Manager
for Oracle is a trademark of Merant. Other
trademarks are the property of their respective
owners. 08/02
TB02CMO251
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