Reviewing changes in a Merge Request

A Merge Request is created to track all the changes, updates, and new files to the Policy documentation. Every time a new commitment is made and pushed to GitLab a new entry detailing and track those changes is logged. This allows for all the policy updates performed to have a historical record that is maintained automatically. This historical record functions similar to a change log would in a document but is accurately and automatically created and maintained.

As part of the review and approval process for Merge Requests each change and commit can be reviewed for accuracy. We walk through how to view and review those changes below.

Prerequisites

Completed Creating a Merge Request
Changes have been committed and pushed to the request.

Video Walkthrough

Coming Soon

Steps

GitLab and navigate to your project.
On the left side of the screen click on the Merge Requests selection.
On the available Merge Requests page select the Merge Request to review.
On the Merge Request page it will default open to the Overview tab as shown below.
On the Commits tab you can see an overview of the most recent commits and pipeline runs. To review a specific commitment you can click on that item.
In this example we opened the Merge branch 'main' into ’MA-MT73' commit.

We are only reviewing the changes for that specific commit in these views. To view all changes or a different commit we would need to navigate to that view.

Once opened we can review the changes to that specific commit action specifically as shown below. We are using the side-by-side view option to compare the changes between the original files contents and the changes. We can see that the form-958.pdf file is a new addition and did not exist before. We can see the specific text that was updated in the 2133.adoc file as well as other changes.
The below screenshot is the same section but using the Inline View option for comparison.
To view all changes for the entire Merge Requests can navigate directly to the changes tab without selecting a specific commit to review. Navigate back into the Merge Request (Steps 1 - 4) and open the Merge Request overview screen again. This time we want to click directly on the Changes tab.
This will open the change review screen again. However, it will include all changes for the entire merge request.