20. Version Control

20. Version Control Systems

Saving your code base at various stages of the development process is a fairly standard practice, and with JourneyApps this is no different. If something goes wrong during development you want to be able to quickly revert the code to the last known stable version, and a version control system makes this a lot simpler. JourneyApps supports 2 forms of Version Control for your apps, you can integrate your app's code with Github or you can you use our built-in 'Revisions' mode. Reach out to your Customer Success Manager or our Developer community if you want to know more about our GitHub version control integration. For our Punch List App we chose 'Revisions' mode, so let's quickly talk about that.

Revisions

Saving a version of your code using 'Revisions' mode is very simple. At the bottom of your screen in OXIDE, next to the visor, you will see a button to 'Save changes'. Depending on what your last action was this button may currently be disabled - this will happen if there are no new changes to your code. And the reason why OXIDE may think that you have no new changes is if the last thing you did was to Deploy your app to the Staging environment, like me. Every time you deploy your app to Staging or Production, OXIDE will automatically save a revision for you.

So, let's go to our Views workspace and go make a change so that we can save a new revision. Let's head over to the 'Main' view, and update the main.view.xml - let's change the heading for our App Admin's to now say: 'Welcome App Admin: All Punch Items Listed Below'. Like this

<heading show-if="$:isAdminUser()">Welcome App Admin: All Punch Items Listed Below</heading>

Once you have made this change you will see that the 'Save changes' button is no longer disabled. Let go ahead and press the button and save a new revision, when prompted for a revision message enter something descriptive, like 'Update admin welcome heading'.

After you have saved a revision you will see it in your app's 'History' panel, and it should look something like this.

It is recommended that you save a revision whenever you've added a new feature to your app, or removed something from your app. It is further recommended that you save the revision before deploying the app to the "Staging" or "Production" environments.

Reach out to your Customer Success Manager or our Developer community for more information about additional advanced features of the various version control systems, like comparing and reverting revisions.