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Posted on April 18th, 2008
Before I joined my current job, they had just standardized on Serena Dimensions for the source control. In the past, I’ve used several different source control systems – CVS, Subversion, TFS, SourceSafe, etc. But I have never opened up a source control client and been utterly clueless as to how to get the files down. I mean, just lost.
But I managed to get past that, only to discover that even though they pretend to have a command line version of their tools, they all pop up a dialog box for the login – there is no way to pass it in via command line. Meaning that any efforts to automate our builds using things like CruiseControl.NET are on hold at the current moment. I was hoping that I’d just be able to use the pvcs task, but apparently that is for Serena ChangeMan, not Serena Dimensions. I even tried renaming the exe from dmcli to pcli just to see if NAnt could work magic – to no avail.
I’m hoping to find some way around it. They supposedly have an API, so I could write my own client, but looking at the license for the samples, I’m not allowed to show anyone the source code for them, so I’m likely going to have to try to figure it out without looking at them.
Has anyone gotten automation working with Serena Dimensions? I’d love to hear from you.
Part 5 of ‘Dimensions CM Build Tools User’s Guide’ dmcm_build_tools_users.pdf covers this although I have only just seen it and have therefore not tried it. This is for Dimensions 10 and I do not know if this exists for earlier versions.
Use -param parameters-file
The parameters file should contain (with values from the dialog):
-user username
-pass password
-host server
-dbname database
-dsn DB Connection
The dmcli is only powerful enough for simple tasks like checking out a build, you can’t use it for history or repo management.
Thanks everyone. I’ve posted an updated entry with the solution I used here