Hello all
We're instituting a fairly simple "3-tier" versioned editing environment for a project of ours. After trying out a few version configurations, we've tentatively settled on the following:
Default "parent"
QA "child" (1, from Default)
editors' "grandchildren" (4, each from QA)
Our permissions are as follows:
Default - private (only SDE/DBO can view and edit)
QA - protected (master-editor has full rights)
editors - protected (each various editor creates their protected version from the QA parent version)
The idea is that someone (me!) serves as a master-editor to verify edits before posting each editor's version to QA. Then the administrator posts the QA edits to Default. This way we have an intermediate step between the editors and the Default version so that bad/incorrect edits don't accidentally make it to Default. None of this is original thinking as it's been described in numerous ESRI documents.
In our prior two-tier design (1 Default parent, 4 editors' children), we ran in to a situation where an editor made about ~40,000 deletions, of which ~700 were incorrect and needed to be recovered. Since no other editors had touched any of these ~700 features, no conflicts were detected and hence no flags were raised before these made it to Default. Fortunately I had an old version that hadn't recently been reconciled/posted, used the "Version Changes" tool to figure out which ~700 features had been accidentally deleted (plus a few more that had been legitimately edited), made a mass edit to all these features (a tiny nudge in this case), and then, when I reconciled with Default, used the Conflict Manager to go one-by-one through all 700 edits to determine which needed to be recovered or legitimately deleted. This is what caused us to move toward the three-tier design.
Since I don't want to do this again, my questions have to do with the actual mechanics of checking and confirming/rejecting edits between the QA version and the editors' versions. So far I've been unable to find the specifics of this in ESRI documentation.
1) Am I correct in understanding that since the QA version is protected, editors are unable to post their edits to QA--only reconcile?
2) Since I'm the owner of the QA version, the "Version Changes" tool is super useful to determine which edits have been made among the various editors' versions relative to their parent version (QA). However, I'm looking to combine the all-seeing "Version Changes" tool with the functionality of the "Conflict Detection Manager"--basically the capability to review and accept/reject each edit regardless of whether it conflicts. Is there any way to do this? The other alternative I can think of is using "Version Changes" to compare QA and editor versions, identify any bad/questionable edits, and then alert the editor to correct any potential errors in their work ... but the reporting abilities of "Version Changes" seem limited and I would greatly prefer a simple yea/nay/reject type of tool like the Conflict Detection Manager.
3) While I've found the ESRI documentation quite helpful (especially in comparing pros and cons of different versioning strategies--nice job), I'd be interested to hear about others' failures, success, and lessons learned with various versioning designs. Part of the catch here is that we have to use the SDE administrator to post from QA to Default--his time is limited, so if we started duplicating this design for other agency projects it could be a real hassle for him. As a workaround, he's given me an SDE connection using his admin authentication--but this seems a bit dicey since it might give too much power to personnel inexperienced with managing SDE (e.g. ... me!). Are we missing something? Are there more ways to assign users rights and roles--for example, one SDE administrator, several "super users" with read/write/load abilities, and dozens of users?
Thanks in advance.
-W
