Since 8.5.2, Domino Designer has allowed integration with Eclipse's source control functionality. An On Disk Project "exports" the NSF as individual flat files which a source control tool like Git or Mercurial can manage and pass to a remote repository on cloud solutions like GitHub and BitBucket or on-premises solutions like Stash or Redmine. But one of the issues has always been that some design elements store metadata like last accessed date which changes even when no material changes have been made.

A few years ago, Cameron Gregor released a Git add-in called Dora. This used XML parsing to remove incidental metadata when committing files in Git. As well as not addressing people who used Mercurial, one of the limitations of Dora was that it didn't handle blank files very well and could cause problems when switching branches that did not all have Dora enabled. For some time I've been aware that Cameron was investigating a Domino Designer plugin to provide a more robust solution.

On Friday, Cameron released that successor to Dora - Swiper. Because this is now a Domino Designer plugin, there are no additional files in your repository and it works regardless of whether the repository is Mercurial or Git. There are two good videos on using and installing Swiper. It's still in beta at the moment, but if you use source control, it's worth investigating further.

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