SmartSVN’s Project Settings Menu 

SmartSVN’s ‘global preferences’ is a method of specifying settings across all your SmartSVN projects for efficiency and simplicity. However, sometimes you need to change settings for a single project, which is where the ‘Project Settings’ menu comes in handy.

In this week’s tip, we’ll look at some of the SmartSVN settings you can apply using this menu.

Accessing Project Settings

To access SmartSVN’s Project Settings, open the ‘Project’ menu and select ‘Settings.’ The different options are listed on the dialog box’s left-hand side.

1) Text File Encoding

This affects how file contents are presented. Choose from:

• Use system’s default encoding – SmartSVN uses the system’s encoding when displaying files. This is the default setting for SmartSVN.

• Use the following encoding – Select your own encoding from the dropdown menu. This is useful if you’re dealing with international characters, which may otherwise be encoded incorrectly.

Note, if you’ve specified a file type using the MIME-Type property, SmartSVN will choose this over the text file encoding settings.

2) Refresh/Scan

SmartSVN can either scan the ‘whole project’ or the ‘root directory only’ when you open a project. In most instances, you’ll want to scan the entire project, but if you’re working with particularly large repositories, the ‘root directory only’ option can speed up this initial scan and avoid high memory consumption.

3) Working Copy

Clicking on ‘Working Copy’ presents you with several checkboxes:

• (Re)set to Commit-Times after manipulating local files – tells SmartSVN to always use a local file’s internal Apache Subversion property commit-time. This is useful for ensuring consistency across timezones, and between clients and the Subversion repository.

• Apply auto-props from SVN ‘config’ file to added files – tells SmartSVN to use the auto-props from the SVN ‘config’ file. With auto-props enabled, you can perform tasks such as automatically inserting keywords into text files and ensuring every file has EOLs that are consistent with the operating system. Not only are auto-props a time-saving feature, but they can help you avoid human error within your project.

• Keep input files after merging (monitored merge) – tells SmartSVN to always keep the .aux files following a merge, even for non-conflicting files. These files are stored in the ‘merged’ state and can be used to gain a deeper insight into what has changed during the merge.

4) Locks

Apache Subversion is built around a ‘copy-modify-merge’ model, but there are times when a ‘lock-modify-unlock’ model may be appropriate, for example when you’re working on image files, which cannot easily be merged. SmartSVN has full support for locking and unlocking files, but if you’re going to make heavy use of locks, you can configure SmartSVN to automatically flag certain files as requiring locking before anyone begins working on them. This is a useful reminder, especially if your project contains multiple non-mergeable files. Open the ‘Lock’ section of the Project Settings dialog and select either ‘all binary files’ or ‘every file,’ if required. The default is ‘no file.’

You can also choose whether SmartSVN should suggest releasing or keeping locks whenever you perform a commit, which is a helpful reminder if your team are working with multiple locks. Finally, the ‘Automatically scan for locks’ option tells SmartSVN to scan for locked files at specified intervals.

Find out more about locks by reading our ‘Locking and Unlocking in SmartSVN’ blog post.

5) Conflicts

When SmartSVN encounters conflicts, it adds new extensions to the conflicting files to help distinguish between them. By default, SmartSVN will take its cues from the config file, but if you want to specify particular extensions, you can select ‘Use following extensions’ and type the desired extensions into the textbox.

Remember, you can download your free edition of SmartSVN Professional at www.smartsvn.com/download