Re: Office Templates and VBA

On 24/01/2008, Chad Knudson <cknudson_at_autodocs.com> wrote:
>
> My company does a lot of work in Microsoft Office templates in Word and
> Excel. Subversion handles these as binary files and that is okay with me
> but there are also the VBA project elements (VBA source code in modules and
> classes as well as binary forms). I would like to utilize Tortoise as our
> client for Subversion access and somehow manage to track the internal VBA
> project elements as well as the files as a whole.
>
> So far, I've written Microsoft Office AddIns to export the source code and
> binary form blobs to files and placed them in a subdirectory underneath
> where the template files reside. This gets me about 40% of what I need J
> It allows for all changes to the source code and form elements to be in the
> repository tracked separately from the binary of the entire document (so I
> can see a history of a source code module etc.)
>
> To get to 100%, I need to be able to convey to knowledge workers that the
> file they are working on in Office is in revision control and give them some
> sort of notification if they need to update their copy prior to working on
> it etc. Most of our content workers only work in the document/spreadsheet,
> and not in the VBA side of things but we need to all be utilizing the same
> revision control mechanism to keep from someone getting out of sync or
> walking over someone elses changes.

If you are versioning binary files, you need to think about setting
the svn:needs-lock on those files. If that property is set the file
becomes read-only on checkout/update. If you want to work on it you
have to request a lock from the server, which prevents anyone else
from committing changes, which will then be over-written by yours. The
read-only-ness acts as a warning when you open the file that you
should not edit it.

Other things to look at are server side hook scripts. You can use
these to send out a post-commit email, and you can use them to reject
commits that do not meet your criteria, such as adding a new binary
file without the svn:needs-lock property set.

Stefan's CommitMonitor program is a way of monitoring changes in the
respository. It's a client side automatic query tool, as opposed to
commit emails which are a server side notification tool.

Simon

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