Is "re-cycling" a ClearCase dynamic view without side-effects, and if not, how to rename view?

Question

One of the shops I'm working at relies on dynamic views in ClearCase. The established norm has been to create a new view for each project effort. Over time I've found that I've only needed to have one or two views concurrently active. I've taken to "reusing" a view by changing the config spec (subsequent to check-in, label, release, etc.). So far, it has worked out. Is there any long-term problem with doing that? If not, is there anyway I can re-name the view (change the view tag) to better reflect what the purpose of the view is?

Answer 1

From my experience there is no log term affect for using only 2 dynamic views instead of one for each "project". If you don't need the views active concurrently its a good method, thats the beauty if dynamic views they can be updated very fast and very frequently.

For the renaming part, why rename? make a similar new dynamic view (or two) and give it a new name (view tag).

Answer 2

For base ClearCase dynamic views, the only side-effect you can have when recycling a config spec are private files:
Those are store within the dynamic view storage, and not always removed when the config spec is reset.

You also need to make sure no files were left checked-out: they also are stored in the view storage, and once the config spec has changed, they may not be visible/reachable any more (but you should still be able to unco them through the 'find co' GUI).

You cannot rename (change the tag) of a view (dynamic or snapshot)

And, just to be complete, you cannot recycle the config spec of an UCM dynamic view (which reference a stream).
You can try to change the foundation baselines of said stream, but again, that is not always possible.

Answer 3

I vote for scrapping old views and creating views afresh. Besides all teh great inputs from VonC, from the disk space point of view, old views tend to get bulky over time and you soon you wont be a favorite with your sysadmins :-)