Branch merge

After committing pending changes, these changes can be synchronized with the other branch(es) to make them available there. This is called merging.

Let’s say a project with a new feature X has to be released before a specific deadline. The business engineer now merges his changes with the trunk. Only new feature X was committed, so the changes made to feature Y were not copied to the trunk during this merge. Now, the project can be released without delay, and the developer can continue working on feature Y. Also, keep in mind that the bug fixing in branch 2 was still in progress during this process without interfering with the development of the new feature or the new release of the software.

How to merge a branch

1. Navigate to the target branch.
2. From the navigation panel, select the currently opened branch and choose "Merge from other branch".
3. If there are still pending changes in the target branch, these need to be committed first.
4. If there are no pending changes in the target branch, a source branch and revision can be selected to merge.

   1. When merging a branch that contains more than one revision since the previous merge, all these revisions are displayed in bold to indicate that you can choose any one of them to merge.

      If you select one, all changes of the intermediate revisions between the selected branch and the previous merge will automatically be included in the merge.

   2. On the bottom of the screen you will find a checkbox Discard changes. Check this option to merge branches without changes. This can be helpful when in the example above you do want to merge change V4, but not V2 and V3. This can be done by first merging the branches by selecting revision V3 and check the option Discard changes. Next merge again, selecting revision V4 and don't check the option Discard changes. 

      Note that changes that have been set to discard changes in the past cannot be merged later on.

      In case you accidentally ticked discard changes but you still want to acquire these changes you have to create a temporary branch in which the changes are taken over and merge that one to the destination branch.

5. Click preview to proceed to the next step. This will show you a preview of the impact of the merge before actually merging.
   1. Affected elements: shows which elements are merged (created, updated, deleted) from the source branch to the tharget branch.
   2. Merge revisions: shows which revisions are included in the merge.
   3. Merge conflicts: shows which conflicts will be introduced after the merge in the target branch.
6. Click apply for the merge to be applied.
7. Your branch is now merged. If needed, you may now want to resolve merge conflicts or commit the pending changes and merge in the target branch.