ClearCase: Email Notification on Deliver

Question

Hi,

At my new company, the CMS is ClearCase. I've worked with Perforce before and it had a nice built-in notification mechanism for the team to keep up-to-date with files that changed in the project. I'm trying to have something equivalent in ClearCase. I would like to know if someone have achieved this before.

Basically, there is three requirements :

• Have a way to subscribe to a project. One receives only notification on projects it has subscribed to.
• When someone deliver an activity, all the subscribers of the impacted project receive an email notification about that activity.
• The email contain the list of the files affected by this activity. Each modified file has a link that perform a diff that shows what this activity change in this file.

So is someone is aware of a module/extension or any other existing way to put that in place or do I have to do all this manually with trigger and perl scripts ?

Thanks,

Martin

Answer 1

I am not sure if that already exist, I am sure it is not provided natively with the UCM product.
May be a more specialized forum like CMCrossroad have more informations, but you already put a question there ;)

Anyhow, the simplest way to implement such a notification would be to have a process following new baselines made on a stream.
Each baseline being composed of activities, it would be simple to list those.
Each baseline being easily compared with its previous baseline, it would be simple to list the file versions, and build the appropriate diff.

As for the users following a project, I would suggest as a "subscription mechanism" the list of views of one of the streams of a project: any user having a view on (one of the streams of) that project is potentially interested.

The general implementation principle would be through post-operation triggers, as described in the "Ten best triggers" article

Answer 2

AFAIK, almost all CC operations can have triggers (in Perl, IIRC) You need to add an email trigger to the deliver operation. Long, long time ago I saw a simple example. But you have to take care of keeping the subscription list and email the appropriate persons.

Answer 3

Hi Martin,

we wanted the same here, so we are using a trigger called ucm_complete_delivery.pl that can be found on CM Crossroads.

You need to apply this trigger to your PVOB (as it's a UCM trigger).

Once you have applied it, you need to define the following Custom Attributes on your UCM component(s):

auto_baseline_email [email protected],[email protected],etc...

It's a bit painful as the mailing list as to be maintained by hand (or you need to use group mail address), but it's better than nothing. :)

Cheers,

Thomas