SmartSVN’s Project Settings: Properties

You can easily change how SmartSVN handles all your Apache Subversion projects using the popular, cross-platform client’s ‘global preferences’ settings. However, sometimes you’ll want to be more flexible and change SmartSVN’s settings on a per-project basis.

In this post, we take a closer look at the changes you can make to Subversion’s properties, on a project-by-project basis using SmartSVN’S ‘Project Settings’ 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.

EOL Style

Subversion doesn’t pay attention to a file’s end-of-line (EOL) markers by default, which can be a problem for teams who are collaborating on a document across different operating systems. Different operating systems use different characters to represent EOL in a text file, and some operating systems struggle when they encounter unexpected EOL markers.

The ‘EOL Style’ option specifies the end-of-line style default for your current project. You can choose from:

• Platform-Dependent/Native – files contain EOL markers native to your operating system.

• LF (Line Feed) – files contain LF characters, regardless of the operating system.

• CR+LF (Carriage Return & Line Feed) – files contain CRLF sequences, regardless of the operating system.

• CR (Carriage Return) – files contain CR characters, regardless of the operating system.

• As is (no convention) – this is typically the default value of EOL-style.

The ‘In case of inconsistent EOLs’ allows you to define how SmartSVN should handle files with inconsistent EOLs.

You can more about EOL Style at the ‘Subversion Properties: EOL-Style’ blog post.

EOL Style — Native

Usually, text files are stored with their ‘native’ EOL Style in the Subversion repository. However, under certain circumstances, it might be convenient to redefine what ‘native’ means, for example, when you’re working on a project on Windows but frequently uploading it to a Unix server. Open this dialog and choose from Linux/Unix, Mac or Windows.

Keyword Substitution

Allows you to automatically add ‘keywords’ into the contents of a file itself. These keywords are useful for automatically maintaining information that would be too time-consuming to keep updating manually.

You can choose from:

• Author – the username of the person who created the revision.

• Date – the UTC the revision was created (note, this is based on the server’s clock not the client’s.)

• ID – a compressed combination of the keywords ‘Author,’ ‘Date’ and ‘Revision.’

• Revision – describes the last revision in which the selected file was changed in the repository.

• URL – a link to the latest version of the file in the repository.

• Header – similar to ‘ID,’ this is a compressed combination of the other keywords, plus the URL information.

You can find out more about Keyword Substitution at our ‘Exploring SVN Properties’ post.

Learn more about the other options available in SmartSVN’s ‘Project Settings’ dialog by reading our Subversion Tip of the Week post.