Last week Visual Paradigm was introduced in my company. It's a great tool and supports subversion for managing the project files. All the Mac users just had minor problems when installing it. I'm stuck with a windows machine and I couldn't convince Visual Paradigm to connect to our SVN server over SSH using a public key. After an odyssey of commandline svn for Windows and Cygwin we finally figured out, how to set up Visual Paradgim to work seamlessy with Putty.

I assume the SVN server is setup to be accessible with SSH and public key authentication. Ususally you then have Putty installed and created a profile that has a private key configured for this server. In addition you should use Pageant to cache the passphrase of the key unless you are using a key without a passphrase (which is a pretty bad idea!). Make sure you can connect to the server using Putty and the key.

After installing Visual Paradigm, go to “Tools”->“Teamwork”->“Open Teamwork client...”. Assuming your repository is located at svn+ssh://name.of.svn.server/srv/svn/project and the UML architecture project is located inside a folder called architecture, the full URL would look like this: svn+ssh://name.of.svn.server/srv/svn/project/architecture. But this won't work since the svn.exe of VP tries to find a profile with the server name you entered. So if your profile is called svn-server, alter the URL to svn+ssh://svn-server/srv/svn/project/architecture and use this instead for the connection in Visual Paradigm. Enter username and leave the password field empty. That's it.

Now you should be able to connect to the repository using the Putty profile with public key authentication.