Restore requirement, documents or projects after unwanted change

[Dr_Bensch]

1. Describe your environment: What is your industry? What is your role in your organization? Describe your stakeholders.
Automotive

2. What version of Windchill are you currently running?
RV&S 12.3.1

3. Describe the problem you are trying to solve. Please include detailed documentation such as screenshots, images or video.

It should be possible to:

• Reset/restore a requirement to a previous state
• Reset/restore a group of requirements to a previous state
• Attaching detached requests back to the document
• Delete requirement without hanging over trash cans
• Reset/restore document properties
• Reset/restore complete document

4. What is the use case for your organization?
After a document or the project structure or project contents (permissions/roles, documents, elements such as Review/CR) have been accidentally rearranged, deleted or manipulated, the original document can be restored before the desired change.

5. What business value would your suggestion represent for your organization?

[skamaraj]

In requirement management, if I unfortunately deleted some item then if I try to restore it back, then its very difficult. I need to view the document history, then look for the attribute content then have to add the item content manually. Moreover this leads to adding of new Item ID and cannot restore back the existing deleted Item.

It will be nice if PTC provides below features,

1. Adding back the dropped item as similar to "Add from Archive" in Source (this is more flexible)

2. Restoring an item on particular point of time,

•      Assume, I have edited an item and saved it. If I try to undo my editing, its not possible. In this case I need to manually remove my modification.
•      If the restore feature is available, then I shall select the item and will choose "as of" timing to restore it back.
•      Anyway each changes were stored by integrity and could be viewed if I "view as of", so no separate effort require to store the changes

3. Restoring back the entire document (may be based on access privilege, like only DocAdmin shall perform this)

This shall save much time, also shall eliminate manual effort and provide more accuracy results.

Its truly as similar to "Add from Archive" and "Restore projects" commands available in Source Integrity.

Advantage:

This will eliminate hanging of deleted reference Items

Provide more accurate "undo"/"restore" data

Helps to avoid manual editing that saves lot of time.

Thanks and Regards,

Sathish

[mrump]

A good one, this would help a lot !

This is a necessary extention to the new "multi-row" editing Features in I11.0.

[Siddharth]

Sathish Kumar Kamaraj‌

- Are you talking about "Item Delete" or "Removing an item (node) from Doc View" ?

- Have you tried using multi-edit ?

I believe you're talking about "Document View", but will wait for your response !

[mrump]

Just today I had the following case:

- One Live Document containing 100 nodes (a generic global test spec with massive traces related to each node).

- A team of 4 Users maintains/authors this document.

- One User accidentally dropped ("MENU/ Content / Delete") 20 nodes yesterday and now the other complain about the missing items:

STATUS QUO:

The only option to re-add the "missing" 20 nodes is to either

- open a historical view of the doc and COPY/PASTE each content node individually back into the live doc

- branch the doc as of yesterday (before the drop) and move the 20 new "branched" nodes into the original live document.

PROBLEM

- Both options result in new IDs for each node (which is killing external references e.g. to test scripts)

- Both options result cannot have their traces propagated back to the new branched items (as dropping the nodes also killed the trace to the validated requirement in it's live req. document) ; if "MENU / DOCUMENT/ Propagate Traces..." is called, you can enter everything needed and the prcess will complete successfully, but not trace will be created to the 20 new/branched nodes.

IDEA

- provide an action that can "re-add" a dropped node to the document it was originally contained by.

- provide a "find former Nodes" query/selection as well

- this shall only apply to actually "dropped" nodes that were not moved into a different document.

- all required data is available in the history of that node ("Contained By" and "References"- relationship)

- re-activate all former traces as well

The general concept should be comparable to the source concept, like

- an archive being the "shared node"

- a member or sub-project being a "node"

- a project being a "segment"

[skamaraj]

Hello @Siddharth,

What @mrump conveys is exactly what I say.  We are still in 10.6 version due to "project.pj" issue, so I am not aware of multi editing feature in "11.x" version.

Regards,

Sathish Kumar

[youbest2]

• Document content can be added back from a historical view as follows:
  1. Open the current view of the document that had the deleted content
  2. Go to Document > Historical > View as of ...
  3. Select a timeframe prior to the content being deleted
  4. Select the deleted node and click Ctrl + C to copy
  5. Go to the current view and press Ctrl + V to paste
• Note that the content will be restored, but the node will get a new ID and will not retain any relationship data

[skamaraj]

Hello @youbest2,

Yes that's known workaround. But as you specified, it will create new Item ID and fields  added to copy fields and significant fields only could be get copied. Moreover its difficult job to compare and look for each and every item that requires to be restored.

Also, the deleted item still loss its reference and simply hanging in the database. The one I propose is as similar to "adding member from archive", which means it shall have its older ID, relationships, history information's, review comments if any too. And among all its just a single click to restore instead of a lengthy work around.

Kind Regards,

Sathish Kumar

[LLawton]

I've never seen a suggestion/idea with that many votes before: 34 as of today, 5 June 2020.

Yet, its status is "Acknowledged"... from 2 years ago!

Isn't this very wrong or am I missing something?

(I'm on 11.2 with no way to upgrade in the next 6 months)

[PE_NangaSystems]

There is a way to bring back deleted content with the same ID using hidden CLI options.

PTC PM says it is dangerous to use the hidden commands as the impact is not fully tested and could cause data corruption in future updates.

we also have many customers - especially new users - who accidentally "delete" requirement(s) from a document and want to bring it back.

[LLawton]

I'm curious, what's the "hidden CLI option" please?

[PE_NangaSystems]

it was discussed in this thread some time ago.

https://community.ptc.com/t5/Windchill-Systems-Software/If-a-user-deletes-a-Content-item-from-a-Document-by-mistake-How/m-p/291671?search-action-id=56676198225&search-result-uid=291671

Again, the import option is not recommended!

It is/was used during solution sample data creation, the behaviour is similar to the documented command importissue.

[olivierlp]

Hello, 

Thank you for your idea and the information you provided.

[acoosemans]

This is a recurring request.

Please check if this is a duplicate (e.g.: https://community.ptc.com/t5/Windchill-Systems-Software/Restoring-an-item-document-in-Integrity-Requirement-Management/idi-p/461425)

[olivierlp]

Thank you @acoosemans. The 2 ideas - and their votes - are now merged. Practically speaking, the older one is merged INTO the newer one. 

[KartikOak]

Two Ideas are merged here, marking the new one as Acknowledged.

Thanks

Kartik

[kjain2]

Hi Everyone,

This is certainly a useful request of course because this happens quite often that user deletes the content intentionally or by mistake.

To overcome this problem for one of my Customer, i have implemented a custom functionality called as i named it "Safe Delete" and "Safe Restore".

1.) Safe Delete -> Deletes content from actual document and send it to trash document automatically in background. Removes all kind of relationships, traces, source links and also notification to user who is doing about affected traces, affected source links etc. Very Detailed.

2.) Safe Restore -> Represent available content to restore on specific document first and then user can choose and restore back to original document. Also restores all relationships, traces, source links etc. (Of course, lots of validation :P) Notification is there too. Works perfect. (Of course, no new ID)

Now we have not disabled OOTB Delete content so user can decide whether contents need to delete permanently using OOTB Delete or my custom Safe Delete with future possibility of restoring. 

If you would like to disable OOTB Delete completely that's also completely fine so user always uses Safe Delete with no confusion.

Just another glimpse from my side. 🙂

PS: May be i have represented entire functionality in just 10-15 lines, in whole was the implementation of almost 3-4 months. 😉

Vielen Dank / Many Thanks,
Kapil Jain

[amund]

The original idea (which was merged with this one) was already created in 2017.

6 years later, the idea is still in "Acknowledged" status.

Will there be a realization soon?

How many votes are needed before an idea becomes reality?

[LLawton]

I agree with the previous comment, 3 years after posting the same observation. Let's face it, Windchill RV&S is a dead product and PTC is betting everything on Codebeamer. Good luck!