The main problem that QOps solves is the difficulty of applying the GIT version control system to the final development file, that contains data, data model, data loading code, codes of all charts and objects for visualization.
What is GIT?
GIT is a version control system that helps track changes made to a codebase, identify the user who made them, and recover deleted or modified code. GIT is one of the most popular open-source version control systems at the moment and is very easy to use. GIT is also completely free software and supports different operating systems (Vac, Windows, Linux, Solaris).
The benefits of GIT are:
- distributed version control system;
- the ability to have many independent code branches;
- atomicity of operations;
- storing data in .git catalog;
- using a data model that ensures the cryptographic integrity of the containing repository;
- the ability to format commits and preview them before applying them within the index.
How to use GIT in the development of Qlik applications?
The problems of applications parallel development and tracking changes in the source code, development process involving more than 1 developer, manual deletion of code and charts are solved by GitLab and GitHub. However, if you put the Qlik Sense/QlikView file on GitLab, this will not work. This file must be divided into separate parts: code, chart settings, variables, extensions etc. Then these parts should be put back into a file. QOps helps automate the process of application disassembling and reassembling.
How does QOps work?
QOps extracts absolutely all source codes from the files of developed applications. Thus, the extracted codes can be placed in the repositories of any version control systems. Modern version control systems have advanced tools for branches, commits, and merges. This allows multiple developers to work on a project in parallel.
QOps allows to automatically build an application from a local or remote repository. Source codes are stored separately from data, that provides flexibility in the development of complex projects. This makes it possible to set up automatic testing and deployment of the application. This, in turn, allows to avoid accidental errors during deploying applications to production, as well as reverting to any previous version of the application, if necessary.
QOps allows to:
- keep application source code separate from data;
- compare and analyze changes in the source code of all application objects;
- collect and implement the developed functionality into the application in parts (they can be created by different developers);
- set up a pipeline of automatic checks and automatic deployment of the application;
- quickly find errors and undo incorrect changes.
More information about QOps here