Hacking the Checkout dialog

I am investigating the possibility of using SVN as a digital asset
management tool at our visual effects company. We are currently using
AlienBrain.

I am trying to replicate a feature of AlienBrain in tsvn. By default, the
AlienBrain repository is synced with a local drive letter on the artist's
machine. In our case, it's the Z drive. For example, if an artist wants to
check out the following directory from the AlienBrain repository:

PathTo/AlienBrain/Repository/OurCoolAnimationProject/MayaScenes

AlienBrain will automatically check out this folder as:

Z:/OurCoolAnimationProject/MayaScenes

SVN allows you to specify any path to be the local working copy. But we need
all our digital asset paths to stay consistent between artists. Path
consistency is essential because of how programs like Maya reference scenes
and textures.

The solution is simple in principle: hack the tsvn checkout dialog. Here is
the functionality I want in tsvn:

1. The artist opens the tsvn checkout dialog.
2. He browses for the folder he wants to checkout using the browse button
next to "URL of repository".
3. As soon as the artist clicks OK in the repo-browser, the "checkout
directory" of the checkout dialog should update automatically with a
"consistent". For example, if the artist chose the following path in the
repo-browser:

file:///D:/SVN/MayaTest

Then the "checkout directory" should now read:

Z:\MayaTest

My question is: is there a way to do this already in the current version of
tsvn? I am aware of the tsnv :commit command, but it requires that you
already know both the source repository folder and the destination local
copy folder before using the command. In other words, you lose the
repo-browser functionality.

Maybe there's a way to create a script to open the repo-browser first using
the :repobrowser command. If the repo-browser returns the path of the
selected folder on OK (does it?), then I can plug in that path into the
:checkout command and generate the "consistent" path as well. Is this
possible?

Thank you!
Received on 2008-03-24 02:12:25 CET