Can subversion append revision id to file?

Question

I would like to contain some meta data in some versioned non-code-level files, specifically the revision ID of the file. If possible, I would like to configure a specific directory so that whenever a file is checked in, the subversion server takes the new revision number and append

/* rev: $revNo */

to the end of the file. The thing is, a script that processes these versioned files would like to know what the revision of the file is and reading the last line in the file, which is entered in a format that doesn't break the rest of the file's semantics, would be easier than using some svn API to check the file revision or even invoking a system level svn command against that versioned object.

Is there a way to automate this task?

Answer 1

Server

Not sure if this can be done on the server side. I assume it can. The server would need a pre-commit hook to perform the action. This might be server-specific. In VisualSVN , you can write a power-shell script which is called pre-commit with the following ordered arguments:

[1] REPOS-PATH 
[2] REV 
[3] TXN-NAME.  

I think you could use these parameters to append that information to a versioned file. I'm just not sure if that would trigger another commit, triggering another pre-commit hook.

Client

You could definitely do something similar on the client side. I use SubWCRev . It's part the TortoiseSVN which uses command-line interface to get SVN parameters.

With a file: SubWC.h.in:

#define SVNREV "$WCREV$"
#define SVNMOD "$WCMODS?Modified:Not modified$";
#define SVNVER "$WCUNVER?Unversioned items found:no unversioned items$";

Then if you run SubWCRev.exe . SubWC.h.in SubWC.h SubWCRev.exe . SubWC.h.in SubWC.h during a pre-build event, you'll get an auto-generated header:

#define SVNREV "2345"
#define SVNMOD "Modified"
#define SVNVER "Unversioned items found"

You can #include that header to embed version info in your application.

There's a good explanation of that here . It doesn't version the generated file for you, but you could probably script an svn ci in that same pre-build script.