# Updating

While you are working on a project in the Workbench, other members of your team may be committing changes to the copy of the project in the repository. To get these changes, you may "update" your Workbench to match the state of the branch. The changes you will see will be specific to the branch that your Workbench project is configured to share. You control when you choose to update.

The update command can be issued from two places: the Team > Update menu, or the Synchronize view. In order to understand the difference between these two commands, it is important to know about the three different kinds of incoming changes.

- A non-conflicting change occurs when a file has been changed remotely but has not been modified locally.
- An auto-mergeable conflicting change occurs when an ASCII file has been changed both remotely and locally (i.e. has non-committed local changes) but the changes are on different lines.
- A non-auto-mergeable conflicting change occurs when one or more of the same lines of an ASCII file or when a binary file has been changed both remotely and locally (binary files are never auto-mergeable).

When you select Team > Update, the contents of the local resources will be updated with incoming changes of all of the above three types. For non-conflicting and auto-mergeable conflicts, there is no additional action required (for auto-mergeable conflicts, the changed local resource is moved to a file prefixed with ".#" just in case the auto-merge wasn't what the user wanted). However, for non-auto-mergeable conflicts, the conflicts are either merged into the local resource using special CVS specific markup text (for ASCII files) or the changed local resource is moved to a file prefixed with ".#" (for binary files). This matches the CVS command line behavior but can be problematic when combined with the Eclipse auto-build mechanism. Also, it is often desirable to know what incoming changes there are before updating any local resources. These issues are addressed by the Synchronize view.

To open the Synchronize view in incoming mode:

1. In one of the navigation views, select the resources which you want to update.
2. From the pop-up menu for the selected resources, select Team > Synchronize with Repository. The Synchronize view will open.
3. On the toolbar of the Synchronize View, click the Incoming mode button to filter out any modified Workbench resources (outgoing changes) that you may have.

In incoming mode, you will see changes that have been committed to the branch since you last updated. The view will indicate the type of each incoming change. There are two update commands (available from the context menu of any resource in the view) to deal with the different types of conflicts: Update and Override and Update. When you select the Update command in the Synchronize view, all selected incoming and auto-mergeable conflicting changes are processed while conflicts that are not auto-mergeable will not be updated (any files that have been successfully processed are removed from the view). The Override and Update command operates on conflicts and will replace the local resources with the remote contents. This "replace" behavior is rarely what is desired. An alternative is described later.

To update non-conflicting and auto-mergeable files:

1. The Structure Compare pane at the top of the Synchronize view contains the hierarchy of resources with incoming changes.
2. Select all conflicting files and choose Update from the pop-up menu. This will update the selected resources that are either incoming changes or auto-mergeable conflicts and remove them from the view. Conflicts whose contents are not auto-mergeable will be left in the view.

If your local Workbench contains any outgoing changes that are not auto-mergeable with incoming changes from the branch, then, instead of performing an Override and Update, you can merge the differences into your Workbench manually, as follows:

1. In the Structure Compare pane, if there is a conflict in the resource list (represented by red arrows), open it (either by double-clicking or selecting Open in Compare Editor from the context menu).
2. In the Text Compare area of the compare editor, local Workbench data is represented on the left, and repository branch data is represented on the right. Examine the differences between the two.
3. Use the text compare area to merge any changes. You can copy changes from the repository revision of the file to the Workbench copy of the file and save the merged Workbench file (using the pop-up menu in the left pane).
4. Once you are completed merging the remote changes into a local file, choose Mark as Merged from the pop-up menu in the Synchronize view. This will mark the local file as having been updated and allow your changes to be committed.

Note: The repository contents are not changed when you update. When you accept incoming changes, these changes are applied to your Workbench. The repository is only changed when you commit your outgoing changes.

Tip: In the Synchronize view, selecting an ancestor of a set of incoming changes will perform the operation on all the appropriate children. For instance, selecting the top-most folder and choosing Update will process all incoming and auto-mergeable conflicting changes and leave all other incoming changes unprocessed.

Warning: The behavior of the Override and Update command described above only applies to the incoming mode of the Synchronize view. In the Incoming/Outgoing mode of the view, the behavior for incoming changes and conflicts is the same but the command will revert outgoing changes to whatever the repository contents are. Exercise great caution if using this command in Incoming/Outgoing mode.

Team programming with CVS
Synchronizing with a CVS repository

Committing
Resolving conflicts
Comparing resources
Version control life cycle: adding and ignoring resources

CVS
Synchronize view