Subversion

Subversion is a relatively new versioning system, designed as a replacement of CVS. Its features include:

• Atomic commits
• The file Rename/Move/Copy actions preserve the revision history
• The directories are versioned
• Native support for binary files
• Optimized repository access
• File properties and MIME types
• Multiple repository access protocols including HTTP and HTTPS.

Subversion is a good choice for sharing/storing large collections of XML files that change frequently. Subversion stores the differences between revisions in an efficient database and minimizes the network load footprint - only the differences are sent between the SVN client and the server.

Flexible Layout of the User Interface

The Syncro SVN Client is composed of several views allowing you to browse the Subversion repositories and your local working copies, compare and merge modifications, check the revision history. A toolbar is also available under the menu bar with the most used actions from different menus.

SVN Repository Browsing

You can add multiple SVN repositories to the list accessed through different protocols (SVN, SVN + SSH, HTTP(S)) and browse them in parallel. In this way you can identify the resources you need to checkout, or even create branches or tags directly in the repository.

SVN Resource History

In Subversion, both files and directories are versioned and have a history. If you want to examine the history for a selected resource and find out what happened at a certain revision you can use the History view.

Advanced View of SVN Working Copy

Each member of a team that shares a SVN repository works on his own local copy of the repository resources. In order to synchronize with the other members the local copy modifications should be synchronized with the repository at regular intervals in both directions:

• commit the local copy modifications to the repository in order to make them available to the other team members,
• update the local copy with the changes committed by the other members.

Several filtering modes of the local copy are available in the Working Copy view for different usages:

• An All Files mode that presents all resources of the local copy, including the ones that were not added to the repository yet.
• A Modified mode with the incoming and outgoing modifications.
• An Incoming mode that presents only the new modifications available on the repository that were not updated to the local copy yet.
• An Outgoing mode that presents only the local copy modifications that were not committed to repository yet.
• A Conflicts mode that presents only the resources that are modified both in the local copy and on the repository.

Author Information at Line Level

Sometimes you need to know not only what lines have changed, but also who changed specific lines in a file. The Annotations view displays the author and the revision number that changed every line in a file the last time. The view is synchronized with the History view and the source code view: clicking in any view updates the current selection in the other two views so that the author name and the revision number are displayed for any line of the source code view.

Check Differences Between Local Version and Repository Version

One of the most common requirements in project development is to see what changes have been made to the files from your working copy or to the files from the repository. There are two diff tools: Diff Files and Diff Directories that allow comparing two different versions of a file or two different versions of a directory. You can examine these changes after a synchronize operation with the repository, by using the Compare action from the toolbar or the Open in Compare Editor action from the contextual menu. The Diff Files and Diff Directories tools can be launched also as external tools from the shortcuts created by the installer.

Resolving Conflicts

An update operation may bring the local copy of a file in a conflict state. The conflict state can be resolved more quickly if the conflicts are edited visually in a compare view which presents the two conflicting versions side by side like a Diff application. In the compare view the user decides for each conflict the variant which will remain and will be finally committed to the repository: the local one, the repository one or a manually edited combination of the two variants.

Revision Graph

The history of a SVN resource can be viewed as a graph in the form of a tree. One node of the graph represents a revision of that resource committed to the trunk or one of the branches of the SVN repository. The icon and the background color of a graph node represent the operation that generated a revision. A graph node contains also the repository path and the revision number.

Directory Change Set

Sometimes a set with all the changes committed on any resource of a folder and its subfolders is needed. The user just selects a start revision number and an end one from the history of the folder and runs an action which computes the set of all these changes. The Directory Change Set view presents the set of changes in a tree format. The revisions corresponding to a resource from the tree are grouped in a separate list.

Integration with Bug Tracking Tools

Users of bug tracking systems can associate the changes they make in the repository resources with a specific ID in their bug tracking system. When the user enters a commit message, a bug ID may be added to this message which links the committed revision with the bug entry maintained in the bug tracking system. The format and the location of the bug ID in the commit message are configured with SVN properties like: bugtraq:url, bugtraq:number, bugtraq:append, bugtraq:logregex.