Explore history

Storing your organization's Hackolade models (and other related files) into a repository provides major benefits.  One of them is that you can easily navigate back in time and understand all the changes made by the team. 

 

Not only can you see what's changed, but also who made the changes, why and when.  You can even compare 2 arbitrary versions and visually review all their differences.  Never be afraid of modifying files anymore: you can easily research and open previous versions, including the files that have been deleted.  Our comprehensive history view makes it easy to explore the commits of your repository and provides powerful search and comparison features.

 

Anatomy of the history view

The history view consists of a list pane and a details pane.

 

The list pane displays a table with commits as well as uncommitted changes, ordered from the most recent to the oldest one. It also renders a colorful tree graph to help you visualize parallel branches.

 

The details pane displays more information about the commit row selected in the list pane. You can either select a commit by clicking on it, or use the up and down arrow keys to navigate through the history.

 

 

The commit message gives context about the changes.  It is visible in the description of every row, as well as in the title of the details pane.  It is preceded by the name of the branch(es) that currently points to that commit.

 

You can see all files that have been added, modified, or deleted in the selected commit.  You can open past versions of Hackolade models in read-only mode, either in the current window by clicking on their names, or in a new application instance by clicking on the corresponding icon.  You can click on "Review changes" to open the

Compare & Merge dialog and analyze visually all the changes that have been made in each file (compared to the previous commit on the same branch.)

 

 

 

Search for a commit

Different filters help you to find specific commits you might be looking for:

• type some free text to list the commits with matching messages
• select a model - or any other file of your repository - to list the commits concerning that file
• select a branch or a tag to list the commits in its history
• select an author to list the commits having been pushed by one of your teammates

 

And, of course, you may combine filters to refine your search.

 

Compare commits

The history view makes it easy to review the changes made in a commit.  But it does more: since a commit is basically a snapshot of your entire repository at a given point in time, you can also select 2 arbitrary commits and analyze the differences thanks to user-friendly visualization.

 

Select which commit should be used in left pane and which other commit should be used in right pane for the comparison using the icons in the table.  Your selection is retained even if you apply different filters. 

 

In the example below, we are comparing the state of the repository in the "contract" branch with its state in the "main" branch.

Once you have selected 2 commits, you can click on the "Compare" button to open the Compare dialog:

 

 

Other actions

All the actions related to a given entry of the history are also available through a contextual menu. You just need to click on the 3 dots to open it.

Note that more actions are coming soon, like reverting commits, or tagging them with an arbitrary label such as a version number.