REST baselines

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Tim Kerby
Tim Kerby Member, Functional Safety Kit (FSK) Posts: 14
edited August 2016 in
Is there a way we can kickoff a baseline through the REST API?

Our teams are desperate for a regular backup solution of their whole project in case they make a mistake as the stream functionality doesn’t allow a revert of all cases. This is separate from the data backups that would mean restoring the server in the event of a major failure. What they would like is a script that triggers an hourly baseline for their project to be running

Any thoughts? I know the API can read baselines but can it request one?

Thanks

Tim

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  • [Deleted User]
    [Deleted User] Posts: 911
    edited August 2016
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    Hi Tim,

    There is not an endpoint for creating baselines with REST. (Furthermore, if there were, we'd hesitate to suggest hourly baselines, as that could cause a significant performance hit.)
  • Tim Kerby
    Tim Kerby Member, Functional Safety Kit (FSK) Posts: 14
    edited August 2016
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    What might be useful is the ability to retrospectively return a project to a previous state. As all the items are versioned with times, it should be a matter of selecting a time, creating a retrospective baseline of the project and being able to selectively restore from that baseline. That would need two features - retrospective baselines, and selective restore

    It's a feature we see our automotive teams requesting as they would like the opportunity to revert in the same way as you could with a source control system
  • [Deleted User]
    [Deleted User] Posts: 68
    edited August 2016
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    We have a similar need, but not just for our automotive teams. All of our teams have concerns over reversion back to a certain point in time, and it may be difficult to know after-the-fact that we should have made a baseline back then.

    Or rather, it is easy to know after we've made a mistake that we should have made the baseline back then, but it is hard to go back in time to make the baseline before we made the mistake. You know what I meant. :)

    Keep in mind also that a baseline doesn't revert all cases either... but this may be going off-topic.

    Hourly seems a bit much for us. We have teams which are manually doing this every evening to track project progress. Because it has to be done at a quiet time each day, the designated team member logs in at midnight each night to run this. So he'd really love the ability to autorun this.
  • Mike Donlon
    Mike Donlon Member Posts: 16
    edited August 2016
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    We originally tried this through the SOAP API using the 'createBaseline' call, creating a baseline of several projects once a week, but we ran into the performance problem which Kristina mentioned, as well as the issue Edward mentioned about the baseline not being able to restore all elements of the definition (particularly relationship links).  We stopped using baselines globally (some teams still generate them manually) and we haven't found a better solution since then.

    Still would like to see a better solution which can be automated (daily, weekly basis), and which can restore the full definition (tags, relationships, attachments, deleted records, etc.), similar to code repository labels & branches.

    Mike

    This is my signature; I hope you like it.
  • Tim Kerby
    Tim Kerby Member, Functional Safety Kit (FSK) Posts: 14
    edited August 2016
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    Think this might be a feature request for you Kristina! Seems like a popular request. As always we're more than happy to discuss further to discuss how this might work in practice.

    The other option would be a way to create an xml backup of a single project or small group of projects and be able to restore it. That would be great for moving projects between servers or restoring an earlier version as it could be reloaded as a copy. This would work for us (if it was scriptable) as most of the projects are self contained without traceability between them
  • [Deleted User]
    [Deleted User] Posts: 911
    edited August 2016
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    Yes, Tim, you're absolutely correct on this being a feature request. I'll switch this question to an Idea so that it can be properly considered.

    I don't know that getting baselines via REST is the right idea (because of the performance implications), but I certainly hear you that an automated way to capture versions and states is much needed.

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