gCTS is still here

[Karin]

You might have missed news about gCTS when SAP S/4HANA 2022 was published. Maybe you even thought: is it already gone again?
Well, it is not. It is alive. There were just not that many spectacular new features available in the last release. This doesn’t mean that we stopped developing or that we do not enhance gCTS anymore.
In SAP S/4HANA 2023 we have some interesting new features that we hope you find useful.
In this blog post, you can get an idea of the biggest news – but there are also many smaller improvements. For the complete list and links to detailed documentation, please take a look at Git-Enabled Change and Transport System in the What’s New Viewer for ABAP Platform.
And don’t forget to take a look into SAP Note 2821718 - Central Note for Git-enabled Change and Transport System (gCTS) for updates and required other SAP Notes.
So now, finally, here are the bigger news for gCTS in SAP S/4HANA 2023:

• Tags: You can now tag commits and thereby mark them as ‘to-be-used’ commits. You can use any text for a commit, but if you used semantic versioning for them, you might find that more beneficial. If you used semantic versioning, the tag will also be added to the properties file of your repository. Meaning that a commit for this change to the properties file will be created. With this, you always know which commit contains the most recent ‘usable’ coding – so the one which is recommended for e.g., production systems as it contains a fully working and tested software state.
  
  Tags are managed on a separate tab, but are also shown on the Commits tab:
  


• Dependencies: It has been possible for a while to define dependencies between repositories. But this is now much easier. A graphical editor has been added. With this, you can easily oversee the dependencies that you have and whether they are fulfilled – so whether the required commits of depending repositories are available by the help of a simple color code. Tags are used here for current and expected versions. So, using tags is a must to be able to manage meaningful dependencies.
  


• Background Activities. If you need to pull a commit containing many changes or clone a ‘big’ repository, you might find it useful to do this outside of your working hours or maybe at least run that process without having to look at it. For this, you can now schedule background activities for cloning a repository, pulling a commit, or switching branches. You can either make it run immediately – but in the background - or define a certain date and time when you want the process to run. To plan the execution, you can find an arrow-down button next to the respective activity.
  
  Or you can plan it on the new Jobs tab. You can also delete a job there if it was planned for the future but is no longer needed
  


• Collaboration on Repositories
  Did you ever have the issue that someone is leaving your company? Maybe yes 😉. But what if he was the owner of a repository? You can now change the owner of a repository by assigning the appropriate permissions to someone else. In addition, it is now also possible (for GitHub and GitLab) to synchronize the user permissions from the Git provider to gCTS (not the other way round). To do so, it is a must that e-mail-addresses for users are maintained on both sides. User IDs can differ and are not taken into consideration for the synchronization. It is also possible to synchronize teams. In this case the team is created in gCTS and the users that also exist on the ABAP systems will be added to the team.
  

And – last but not least – we added new topics to the documentation to better explain the ‘g’ and the ‘CTS’ in ‘gCTS’. In References to Git Documentation we linked our documentation with the corresponding documentation of the required Git functionality . And in CTS Entities Used in gCTS you can learn more about how the entities of CTS that you might know from the past are used in gCTS and what is different.

Thanks for reading. As always: your feedback and questions are more than welcome!