Sometimes, while working on a project based on a complex template, you may encounter many dependencies, such as DFB blocks, stylesheets, or even intricate sample record sets in a data dictionary. In such cases, it's useful to preview the impact a change to a dependency has on the dependent resources, without having to create and publish a new version each time. This can prevent version overload and helps maintain a cleaner version history. That's where the concept of a working copy comes into play.

Why Use Working Copies?

When developing or designing, you often need to see the effects of your changes immediately. Using working copies allows you to:

• Preview changes: See how modifications to dependencies (like a DFB block) affect dependent resources (like a DFF using it) without publishing.
• Avoid version explosion: Prevent an overwhelming number of versions by not needing to publish every small change.

Configuring Your Environment

The behavior you desire in a design or development environment differs from what you need in production. In production, you typically want to ensure stability by only using published versions of dependencies. However, in a design or development environment, you might want to see the changes you’re making immediately.

This behavior is configurable in Resource Director using an environment variable: version.onlyPublishedCanBeActive

Default Setting

By default, version.onlyPublishedCanBeActive is set to true. This means that only published versions can be loaded as dependencies, which is ideal for production environments.

Changing the Setting for Design Environments

For design or development environments, you may want to switch this setting to false. This allows working copies to be loaded as dependencies, enabling you to preview changes without the need to publish.
 

Conclusion

Using working copies in your design or development environment allows for more flexible and efficient testing of changes without cluttering your version history with unnecessary published versions.

By configuring the version.onlyPublishedCanBeActive environment variable, you can easily switch between using only published versions or including working copies based on your environment needs.

This approach helps streamline your development process, making it easier to manage dependencies and preview changes effectively.