Baseline

MADCAT can manage baselines of your data. Baselines can be seen as read-only snapshots of your data. Once a baseline is closed, the data is saved at the time of closure. You can continue modifying your data but you will always be able to see it at the time of baseline's closure.
It can show you dynamically the changes made between baselines with colors.


When activated, all changes made to attributes values or items are traced. History can be parsed and old values restored easily.
You get a detailed history of the item from the explorer :

The history and the status are dependent of the reference baseline which can be changed with the menu "Baselines" :

The term "The Big Bang" refers to the very beginning of your project; when it was empty !

With the menu "Baselines", end users can also easily navigate through baselines and compare them by changing the reference baseline. Create new baseline from any existing baseline (create a new branch)


When you close a baseline, MADCAT asks you for the name of a new baseline. This new baseline will be a child of the closed baseline.

The history of changes performed in a baseline is saved in a baseline file (Extension is XBL). A baseline file can be loaded at any time. It is also an XML file which can be used to perform analysis and reporting.

The XBL files are associated to a folder having the baseline name. This folder contains the project data for that baseline. They are managed exactly like project data without baseline which are in the root of folder "Project". So if you don't want to use the baselines anymore you can just remove the baseline element in the workspace definition file, move the project data of one baseline to the root of folder "Project" and restart your workspace.

By switching from one baseline to another, you can produce a version tree like this :

Baseline mechanism can be activated or deactivated at any time by modifying the workspace definition file.