Branching diverges from the mainline within an individual member’s history and creates a new revision path. These revisions can then be merged with the member revision on the mainline. Merging combines changes into a new revision, usually the head revision.

The Merge Branch command merges the entire contents of a branch into a single revision. Integrity Lifecycle Manager keeps track of the changes that have been merged so that later revisions on the branch are not re-merged when the next Merge Branch operation occurs. Any subsequent Merge Branch operations merge only changes since the previous merge operation.

Merging operations are available only in the GUI and CLI.

A merge conflict occurs if the revisions being merged both have changes in a common segment of lines. Integrity Lifecycle Manager provides visual two- or three-way differencing and merging tools. Depending on the operation, merging can launch the Visual Difference tool and the Visual Merge tool to automatically highlight conflicts for resolution. Integrity Lifecycle Manager also supports third-party merging and differencing tools such as Araxis and Beyond Compare.

Even if a no conflict is reported as a result of a merge operation, there can still be inconsistencies in the merge results that can only be detected by someone with an understanding of the context of the change. Therefore, anytime a merge is performed, PTC recommends that you examine and test the merged results before checking them into the repository.