Demote: Moving Elements Out of a Stream

The Demote command moves one or more element versions out of a parent stream (the source stream), while making those versions accessible in a child stream (the destination stream) -- and in workspaces and streams below it.

The basic use of demote is to stop sharing changes in a given stream by moving those changes out of the stream. A demote operation is different from a Revert to Basis operation in that the changes are not completely abandoned. Instead, the current file versions are retained in the child stream that you specify during the demote process.

Suppose, for example, you made some changes to the matrix.ini file and promoted your changes to the Dev stream, with the result that your changes were causing software builds to fail. You could demote those changes from the Dev stream to a child stream, which would enable your builds to succeed while you fixed the problematic file in another location. Once you had made the appropriate corrections, you could promote the matrix.ini file to the Dev stream once more.

The Demote option is available in several places in the AccuRev GUI, such as the StreamBrowser and in the Conflict mode of the Stream View Explorer.

When considering a demote operation, keep the following points in mind:

•	The destination stream must be an immediate child of the source stream. You cannot demote to a non-child stream nor can you demote more than one level beneath the source stream.

•	You cannot demote from a workspace, since it has no valid destination streams beneath it.

•	You can only demote the head version of an element.

•	You cannot demote elements that have dependencies or that have an overlap status in the destination stream.

•	A demote operation does not overwrite the element version in the destination stream if that version is newer than the version contained in the source stream.

•	Just as you can promote by file, transaction, or issue, you can also demote by file, transaction, and issue.

•	AccuRev recommends demoting by transaction as a best practice, since you can retain previous versions of the element in the source stream which you cannot do when demoting by file.

Demote and Entity Types

The following table indicates whether it is possible to demote to or from various AccuRev entities.

AccuRev Entity	Demote from?	Demote to?
Dynamic stream	Yes	Yes
Time-based stream	Yes	Yes
Snapshot stream	No	No
Pass-through stream	No	No
Gated stream	No	No
Workspace	No	Yes
Depot (root)	Yes	No
Reference tree	No	No