Exploring Revisions, Duplicates and Branches with the Revision Explorer

You can explore the links that exist between different revisions, branches, and duplicates of the selected object.

The first time you open the Revision Explorer, the default settings are applied. Then, the settings you specified are retrieved after refreshing the Revision Explorer, or the next time you open it.

Links corresponding to Duplicate, New Branch, and New Revision From operations are only maintained for engineering apps content like, for example, physical products, functional references, or logical components. For more information about engineering apps content and policies, see Content Lifecycle.

Required access roles: Reader, Contributor, Author, Leader, Owner. For more information, see Collaborative Lifecycle Access to Content.

This task shows you how to:

Before you begin:
  • To switch between graph view and graph list view, from the toolbar, click the current view icon (Graph View or Graph List View ), and select the view of your choice.
  • To display the duplicates of the selected object, click Show Duplicates . The icon becomes blue when the duplicates are displayed. To hide them, click the icon again.
    Note: This command is not available when the Revision Explorer opens in revision-only mode, for example to select a revision.

Your choices are persistent after refreshing the browser and in your next sessions.

Open the Revision Explorer

To open the Revision Explorer, from the Lifecycle section of the action bar, click Revisions .

Use the Revision Explorer in Graph View

The objects are displayed as thumbnails with their name, and revision ID.

The links between the objects and the lifecycle icons show the lifecycle operations that created them:

  • New Revision
  • New Revision From
  • New Branch
  • Duplicate

Notes:
  • If two revisions are created from the same revision, the second one is displayed in the Revision Explorer with the New Revision From icon.
  • If you select a revision that is not the latest, and create a new revision with the New Revision command, the Revision Explorer displays the New Revision From icon on the newly created revision.
  • In the Revision Explorer, the line in bold indicates the object which content was copied from to create the new revision. For example, P.1 D was created from P1 B:

  1. To modify the orientation of the Revision Explorer, from the toolbar, click the current orientation (for example, Up), and from the menu, click the orientation of your choice:
    • Left: The initial object is on the right.
    • Right: The initial object is on the left.
    • Up: The initial object is on the bottom.
    • Down: The initial object is on top.
  2. To navigate through the different parts of the Revision Explorer, move the blue frame in the map overview under the toolbar.

    Tip: You can also directly drag the Revision Explorer to the required position.
    To hide or display the map overview, from the toolbar, click Toggle Map Overview Visibility.

  3. To zoom in and zoom out, either click + and - in the map overview, or scroll the mouse wheel anywhere in the Revision Explorer.

    Tip: In the toolbar, click Zoom to fit to display the entire Revision Explorer.

Use the Revision Explorer in Graph List View

The objects are displayed in a grid view, with the icons corresponding to the operation that created them next to their title.

Click the column headers to modify the order of the list.

Important: The Graph column displays the lifecycle links between the revisions, branches, and duplicates. This column is displayed when objects are sorted by creation date. It is not displayed when the objects are sorted by any other column.

By default, the objects are sorted descending (latest on top) based on the creation date.

Note: In case of intermediate revisions, to display the revisions in the correct order, the objects are sorted by creation date for revisions created at the end of the branch, and by ancestor for intermediate revisions. For more information, see Revisions.

If you click on the Creation Date column, objects are sorted by creation date only. To go back to the sorting by both creation date and ancestor, click the Graph column.