In DevTest v8, you can record, deploy and edit Virtual Services centrally from the Portal interface.
If a virtual service is deployed to the VSE, you can edit the virtual service image in the Portal, which obviously doesn't change the version deployed to the VSE.
But how do you know if the version you are editing in the Portal is the same as the deployed version? If I log on to the Portal to edit a VSI, how can I be confident that no-one else has edited it in the meantime, since it's now a shared environment with no version control?
This is a question of version control, and the ability to see changes from a baseline. We don't want to give direct server filesystem access to all our users in order to access the Projects folder where all the Virtual Service files reside - they would be able to edit or delete anyone's files (intentionally or accidentally), and Company security policy prevents direct server access to general users. Whatever files are in the Projects folder on the Portal server will appear in the Portal interface. We can move the pointer to the Projects folder to a shared drive, to negate direct server access, but this still doesn't inherently solve my problem.
Ideally we'd like to control the Projects folder using a version control system like git. We can't overwrite the Project folder with the contents of the MAR file or the contents of the folder from the git repo (using the master version - the last deployed MAR file for this VS), because then we would overwrite and lose any changes made through the Portal. How do we version control without losing changes made through the Portal? How do we ensure that, if someone wants to start editing an existing service, they can be confident they are editing from the correct/master branch of the version control system?