Builder

Builder is a lightweight IDE that is part of the Mprove UI.

You can create complete semantic models in the web UI, but we recommend working with Malloy files in your local IDE using the Malloy VS Code extension. You can then sync the files with the Mprove Server to check for errors and explore Mprove models.

Mprove Files

Mprove project supports the following file types::

Version Control

Mprove treats the files in the project repository as the single source of truth.

Drafts are stored in the database. Once satisfied with a draft, the user can save it as a file for future use.

When a user saves a draft as a file in the Production repository, the change is committed automatically.

When a user saves a draft as a file in their Dev repository, the change remains uncommitted.

Project Repositories

Each project has 3 types of repositories that are local to mprove server:

Production - repository that mirrors Remote repository content
Dev - personal repository for each project member with FilesEditor role
Session - separate repository for each session of type Editor

Dev repositories allow users to edit files and test changes without affecting Production version of files.

Users with FilesEditor role can manually edit files in their personal Dev repositories.

To be able to edit files, a user with the FilesEditor role must select the Dev repository in the navigation bar.

Files Validation

When user makes a manual change to any file, Mprove does the following:

Validates all files
Shows validation errors (if any)
Updates Models, Charts, Dashboards and Reports structure that have passed validation

Once the user is satisfied with the changes made, the user can commit and push (deploy) changes to Production repository to share results with the team.

When changes are pushed to Production, they are actually pushed to Remote first, and then pulled from Remote to Production. In other words, changes from the Dev repository are pushed to the Production repository via the Remote repository in a single user action.

These operations are available on the Files page:

Save and Validate - Save the changes. Mprove will automatically check all files in the project repository data folder for errors.

If errors are found during files validation step, they need to be fixed before pushing to production.

Commit - Commit changes in Dev repo.
Push - Deploy committed changes from Dev repo to Production repo (and to Remote repo).
Revert to Last Commit - Discard saved changes in Dev repo that were not committed.
Revert to Production - Revert all changes in the Dev repo to the current Production version of files.
Pull from Remote - Fetch changes from Remote repo branch and merge into the selected repo branch.
Merge branch - Merge changes from another branch into the current branch.
Create branch - Create a new branch.
Delete branch - Delete current branch.

Git Branches

Small projects may only need to use one branch (usually called master or main). Advanced git users may work in different branches.

Users can switch between branches using repo-branch selector in navigation bar.