E0302000c: Item <path\filename;version> cannot be processed, later version exists or has tag.

Products

• CA Harvest Software Change Manager
• CA Harvest Software Change Manager - OpenMake Meister

Issue/Introduction

Our project has a normal development cycle with states UT, SIT, UAT and PROD, and it has additional states EMER and EMER_DEPLOY to handle emergency fix requests.  PROD, EMER, and EMER_DEPLOY states all share the same data view named PROD.  When an emergency fix request comes in, a package is created in the EMER state, the file is checked out, fixed and checked in, then the package is promoted to the EMER_DEPLOY state.  The problem we are seeing is if we then want to check out the same file in the "UT" state we get the error message 

E0302000c: Item <path\filename;version> cannot be processed, later version exists or has tag.

How can we check out files that have been updated in the EMER state?

Environment

Release : 12.6 and higher

Component : CA Harvest Software Change Manager

Cause

With Harvest, a version of a file is not "visible" in any particular data view until that version has been promoted to that state.  The documentation has more explanation about this here: Understanding Versions - Views and Versions and here: Manage Packages in the Life Cycle

In this situation, a new version was created in the EMER state, and since the package had never been promoted to the UT state, the new version wasn't "visible" there. 

Resolution

The solution is to promote the package from EMER_DEPLOY state to UT state once the emergency fix has been deployed to production. 

Additional Information

The Software Change Manager documentation includes detailed descriptions of all the example lifecycle templates that are included with Harvest.  You can read more about those here: Predefined Lifecycle Templates

In particular, one of these predefined templates shows an example of a Harvest lifecycle that might be used to maintain an ongoing project and handle any emergency fixes that might be needed.  You can read more about this particular lifecycle template here: Release with Emergency template