Repositories help managing design artifacts by offering adequate storage and manipulation services.
Some of the most important features of a repository are version management and activity management. Versioning comprises the specification, storage, and maintenance of versioned design objects whereas activity management is responsible for cooperation control, designflow management and management of design transactions processing versioned design objects. For that reason, we propose to provide repository managers by generic methods, i.e. by generating the corresponding functionality. In this paper, we consider a representative cooperation model, which is based on versioning services, in order to identify the major data manipulation and activity control needs of cooperative design applications. We will focus on the data manipulation needs by introducing our generative approach for customizing versioning facilities.