Ben Summers wrote:
>
> Hello!
>
> Thanks for all the hard work on TortoiseSVN. I'm using it as a front end
> for SVN for a group of about 10 non-technical users who use it to
> collaborate on a 12Gb collection of binary documents, mainly in MS
> Office formats. It works really well with only a small amount of
> training, which is pretty impressive for a front end to a source control
> system aimed at software developers.
>
> In relation to this non-standard use, I need to implement a couple of
> features. I thought I would do this in a general enough manner to get
> them accepted into the main source tree, and hope you'll help with
> commenting on my plan and perhaps pointing me to appropriate bits of the
> code.
>
>
> These features are about making round trips to and from a web
> application with minimal fuss:
>
> 1) Right click menu to open a URL: The user right clicks on the file in
> Explorer, and chooses 'Open in X'. TortoiseSVN opens a URL into which
> are substituted the repository URL, name, path etc.
>
> 2) Clicking on a link in the web site opens a Windows Explorer window
> with the selected file highlighted. If it's not checked out on disc,
> offer to check out the parent folder.
>
>
> For the implementation, I'm thinking along the lines of
>
> 1) For the context menu, use something similar to "Integration with
> Bugtracking Systems". A property would be read from the root of the
> repository with name tsvn:contextmenu. This contains | separated pairs
> of menu entry name and URL. The URL contains substitution markers such
> as %URL%, %REPOSITORY%, %PATH%. For example, to add a 'View in Trac'
> menu entry, I would set the property to
>
> View in Trac|http://example.com/project/browser/%PATH%
>
> I would see this menu entry below the SVN Update context menu entry, and
> choosing it would open a web browser window for the file or folder in Trac.
>
> In this case I need to be able to set the properly on the root and have
> it work everywhere below, even if the user has checked out a subfolder
> or created new files. Because of the size of the repositories, the users
> don't check out everything, and they certainly won't be able to apply
> the properties to the new folders they create. I think that
> ProjectProperties will recurse downwards to find them in
> ReadPropsPathList(), but not below folders which are checked out. If
> this is right, what's the best way of reading it from the repository root?
Please check the docs for project properties. They can be applied to
every folder (and in TSVN 1.5 they're added automatically when a folder
is added to version control).
You must not contact the repository from a shell extension. If the
server is down or even just slow, the whole shell will hang/block -
which makes the user very, very angry.
If you really want to contact the repository to ask for that
information, then you will have to implement your own shell extension.
I'm sorry, but I can't accept such a feature in TSVN and risk blocking
the whole system.
> To add the menu entries, I think I would need to add a small number of
> entries to the list in TortoiseShell/ContextMenu.cpp, and then when the
> menu is opened show or hide them and set the text label appropriately.
> There may be some fun and games to transfer the necessary information to
> and from the cache process.
You don't have to cache those. Reading project properties would be quite
fast - fast enough to do that in the context menu handler.
Or at least, I would try it that way first and see how the performance
is. If it's bad, you can then change the cache to also include those
properties.
And I would implement a function which reads the props, extracts the
names for the menu entries and then add those entries dynamically. Don't
add menus and then 'hide' them if they're not needed.
>
> An alternative implementation is to add some registry entries which
> allow it to be set up globally for all repositories. This would do fine
> for me, but is less general and so less useful to the project.
But much easier to do: a simple registry entry can already show a
context menu, even without a shell extension. Just read the docs in the
MSDN.
As an example, think of all the text editors which add an 'open with
mytexteditor' for every file. You could write a small program or even
script which would create the URL to open from the selected file and
then open the browser - that could be implemented in a few minutes.
> 2) With the URL scheme for clicking a link in a web page, I'd extend the
> tsvn: url scheme handler. It seems as reasonable as anything to add a
> URL style parameter, as SVN itself doesn't use them. So
> ?tsvnaction=locate appended to the URL would do the trick.
>
> tsvn:http://example.com/repo/path/to/file.txt?tsvnaction=locate
>
> Implementing it is harder, because I don't think there's a store of all
> checked out repositories. A possible implementation is to get TSVNCache
> to record the repositories it's seen in the Registry, and then run
> through them testing to see if they still exist when the request is
> received. As I understand it, the URL gets passed to TortoiseProc with
> /command:checkout. I can either modify the checkout command, or add a
> new one for handling the URL which may be a bit neater.
What happens if someone has the same folder checked out twice? Which
location would you then use?
Since this operation won't happen very often, it wouldn't matter if it
would take a few seconds to find the file from the URL. So I guess a new
function in the cache which would find a local path for a given URL
would do the trick here. But the problem persists: what to do when an
URL matches multiple local paths?
> I presume that I can start coding by installing the latest Visual Studio
> Express from http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/express/aa700735.aspx . I
> suspect my copy of Visual C++ 6.0 is a bit on the old side, hopefully
> the new one won't clash.
VSExpress won't do the trick here, sorry. Because the express edition
doesn't come with the MFC/ATL libraries which we use in TSVN.
You can only compile some sub projects of TSVN with the express edition:
TortoiseBlame, CrashRpt, ResText, SubWCRev, TortoiseIDiff, TortoiseUDiff.
You will need the professional edition of VS to compile TSVNCache and
TortoiseProc.
Stefan
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Received on Thu Sep 6 19:01:19 2007