This article is intended to illustrate the advantages of Commit Monitor, an SVN monitoring tool, when used to control Enterprise Architect modelling projects shared using SVN repositories.
Commit Monitor is a free software (GNU GPL v2 code license) that monitors Subversion repositories for new commits and shows notifications when that happens. This tool works in the Windows notification bar area and checks on a regular basis the SVN logs from the configured repositories to detect any new commit.
This tool can be very useful when configured with an Enterprise Architect modelling project, set up with version controls settings on a chosen SVN repository to let users work in a collaborative mode.
Once installed, Commit Monitor icon is displayed in the windows notification bar.
Commit Monitor lets you set the SVN settings for each EA project that needs to be monitored:
- Username / password for the SVN account
- Check every xxx minutes : by default Commit Monitor queries the SVN repository every 90 minutes ; this value can be modified through this field
- Project : name of the project to identify in this tool e.g. Projet1 EA
- URL : SVN repository url e.g. https://11.22.33.44/svn/Projet1/
Commit Monitor displays an animated version of its icon once it has detected new a commit for a configured project: 
A double click on this icon opens Commit Monitor ; all monitored projects with new commits are shown in bold. In the screenshot below, "Projet1 EA (4)" means that there are 4 new unread commits (each line matches a new SVN version):
The information displayed as illustrated in the above screenshot includes:
- Revision number
- Date and time
- Author (SVN user account)
- Content of the message entered in the SVN logs
Commit Monitor makes it possible to filter through the commits e.g. to display only those matching "use case 1":
Note that this free tool was originally designed to monitor dev source code stored in an SVN repository that hence can be monitored similarly to the XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) files from an Enterprise Architect modelling project as illustrated in this article.
When used by the entire team, users could be more encline taking a minute or so to entering a description about the changes carried in the model. As a result, it will help everyone understanding what has been changed in the modelling project through the SVN logs.
Commit Monitor is available to download from the following link: http://code.google.com/p/commitmonitor/downloads/list