Best practice for source control

[dozminkowski]

I would like to keep my UR program in version control system, e.g. git. How do I that?

When I create a program, I get 3 files.

• urp - This is binary and not suitable for version control, cause I can not compare versions or merge differences
• script - This would be best choice, probably. Two problems though. There are $ markers with line numbers which are changing. One line change changes all the other lines below. Second, major deal breaker, robot does not want to load them.
• txt - This is also read only and only contains Program part.

Is there at least a command line to build urp from script and back?

Update:
Ok, I can uncompress urp to get xml file, but still that does not really help if I want to merge.

Related:

Simulator to robot programming workflow

@mchollett Generating a program in URSim, and moving to the robot is straight forward. The files generated by a program are: .urp: Contains the program including “meta data”, and which is loadable from PolyScope to generate the graphical view. The file is compressed XML - but an uncompressed XML file with a .urp extension can also be loaded in PolyScope. The XML is fairly human readable, and might be programmatically altered, however the syntax is not documented and hence this is not very s…

How to convert URScript to Polyscopr .urp program

Hi there. There is no function to convert a .script format directly into a .urp. The format of a .urp is xml. You can uncompress a .urp using WinRar. Open the resulting file format in an xml friendly editor and you will see the structure. Converting .script into .urp will take a lot of work on the part of the programmer.

So basically .urp is single source of truth. It is a gzipped xml file. I wonder if I can merge the changes done in two separate files.

[bba]

The urp file is what you want. .script is interpreted version of .urp & installation file. Therefore a complete image is .urp & installation.

Best regards

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Brent Bartson
Technical Support Manager, North America

Universal Robots USA, Inc.
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[john_courtney]

dozminkowski,

Did you have any success with implementing source control? I too would like to use git.

My department really needs a better VCS, as things quickly can become a mess. I have an upcoming project where I’ll need to implement 16 different programs to work with 8 different customer parts.

Brent,

Is there any effective way to manage the version of programs and installations on the controller? I can store programs in a repository or vault, but if another person introduces changes over time to the robot system, this can lead to some quality escapes.

[ludwig.oefele]

My approach for version control is to use the urp Program only as a stub (which is never or almost never changing). And the real programming happens in scripts, which are “included” into this stub. Every program node can be expressed in a script (to see how: use that program node, “save all” and check the resulting script). To learn about the syntax, check the document “scriptManual.pdf”:
https://www.universal-robots.com/download/?option=53317#section53124

I understand, that graphical programming is easier, but I prefer to “write” my programs and to have them in a searchable, editor-editable and versionable format.

[john_courtney]

That’s a helpful idea. I did something similar with an application in which I needed to vary the velocity and acceleration of a painting program. However, the debugging tools for scripts are not that developed. While I’m happy that the interpreter will show what line of a script file has a syntax error, it would also be nice to create a breakpoint or move the program pointer to a specific line to check a position or move.

From the related thread above, it appears you can uncompress the .urp and .installation file to get an xml file. You can also make edits to that xml file with a xml-friendly editor, and simply change the extension to .urp to load it back onto the UR robot. The only challenge here is Universal Robots hasn’t published the syntax, but it still seems promising to be able to compare both .urp and .installation files. The .variables file is already in text format.