Preliminary Concepts › Entities and Version Management › Version

Version

For all entity types except modeled and SQL dataviews

Each named definition of a given type can exist in one or more forms, called versions, each of which is identified by a number that CA Ideal assigns. There can be as many as 999 versions with the same name. CA Ideal assigns numbers to versions sequentially as they are created, starting with number 1. The application developer cannot modify version numbers.

For CA Datacom/DB CBS dataviews and sequential file dataviews modeled in the dictionary

CA Ideal assigns numbers to test versions separately from production and history versions. Test versions are identified as T1 through T999. Production and history versions are identified as 1 through 999.

For SQL dataviews

Only one version is assigned; version 1 in production status. CA Ideal generally does not display this version number or status, or require the user to specify it.

Editing a definition has no effect on the version number. No matter how many changes are made, the version number remains the same. You can only create new versions with the same name by using the DUPLICATE...NEXT VERSION command. This command makes a copy of an existing version. CA Ideal assigns each new version of a definition the next higher number than the highest previously assigned number. When a version is deleted from the system, unless it was the highest, its number is never reassigned to another version with the same name.

Each definition is uniquely identified by the combination of its type, name, and version number. You can always reference it by this combination.

There are two cases when you can reference a particular definition without using the version number:

• You can reference the production status version of a definition by replacing the version number with the term PROD (since there can be only one production version at a time).
• For any type of definition except for an SQL dataview definition, you can reference the most recently created version of a definition by replacing the version number with the term LAST.

The version clause is optional when specifying PROD or LAST. For example, if the production version of a report definition named SALARIES is version 5, you can reference it as REPORT SALARIES VERSION 5 or as REPORT SALARIES VERSION PROD. If there are seven versions of a program named UPDATE (numbered 1 through 7), you can reference the most recently created version as PROGRAM UPDATE VERSION 7 or as PROGRAM UPDATE VERSION LAST.