Figure 4.16. The Revision Log Dialog

There are several places from where you can show the Log dialog:

If the repository is unavailable you will see the Want to go offline? dialog, described in Section 4.9.10, “Offline Mode”.

The top pane has an Actions column containing icons that summarize what has been done in that revision. There are four different icons, each shown in its own column.

If a revision modified a file or directory, the modified icon is shown in the first column.

If a revision added a file or directory, the added icon is shown in the second column.

If a revision deleted a file or directory, the deleted icon is shown in the third column.

If a revision replaced a file or directory, the replaced icon is shown in the fourth column.

Figure 4.17. The Revision Log Dialog Top Pane with Context Menu

The top pane of the Log dialog has a context menu that allows you to access much more information. Some of these menu entries appear only when the log is shown for a file, and some only when the log is shown for a folder.

Figure 4.18. Top Pane Context Menu for 2 Selected Revisions

If you select two revisions at once (using the usual Ctrl-modifier), the context menu changes and gives you fewer options:

If you select two or more revisions (using the usual Ctrl or Shift modifiers), the context menu will include an entry to Revert all changes which were made in the selected revisions. This is the easiest way to rollback a group of revisions in one go.

You can also choose to merge the selected revisions to another working copy, as described above.

If all selected revisions have the same author, you can edit the author of all those revisions in one go.

Figure 4.19. The Log Dialog Bottom Pane with Context Menu

The bottom pane of the Log dialog also has a context menu that allows you to

Tip

You may notice that sometimes we refer to changes and other times to differences. What's the difference? Subversion uses revision numbers to mean 2 different things. A revision generally represents the state of the repository at a point in time, but it can also be used to represent the changeset which created that revision, e.g. “Done in r1234” means that the changes committed in r1234 implement feature X. To make it clearer which sense is being used, we use two different terms. If you select two revisions N and M, the context menu will offer to show the difference between those two revisions. In Subversion terms this is diff -r M:N. If you select a single revision N, the context menu will offer to show the changes made in that revision. In Subversion terms this is diff -r N-1:N or diff -c N. The bottom pane shows the files changed in all selected revisions, so the context menu always offers to show changes.

The Log dialog does not always show all changes ever made for a number of reasons:

If you want to see more log messages, click the Next 100 to retrieve the next 100 log messages. You can repeat this as many times as needed.

Next to this button there is a multi-function button which remembers the last option you used it for. Click on the arrow to see the other options offered.

Use Show Range ... if you want to view a specific range of revisions. A dialog will then prompt you to enter the start and end revision.

Use Show All if you want to see all log messages from HEAD right back to revision 1.

To refresh the latest revision in case there were other commits while the log dialog was open, hit the F5 key.

To refresh the log cache, hit the Ctrl-F5 keys.

Because the log dialog shows you the log from HEAD, not from the current working copy revision, it often happens that there are log messages shown for content which has not yet been updated in your working copy. To help make this clearer, the commit message which corresponds to the revision you have in your working copy is shown in bold.

When you show the log for a folder the revision highlighted is the highest revision found anywhere within that folder, which requires a crawl of the working copy. The crawl takes place within a separate thread so as not to delay showing the log, but as a result highlighting for folders may not appear immediately.

Subversion 1.5 and later keeps a record of merges using properties. This allows us to get a more detailed history of merged changes. For example, if you develop a new feature on a branch and then merge that branch back to trunk, the feature development will show up on the trunk log as a single commit for the merge, even though there may have been 1000 commits during branch development.

Figure 4.20. The Log Dialog Showing Merge Tracking Revisions

If you want to see the detail of which revisions were merged as part of that commit, use the Include merged revisions checkbox. This will fetch the log messages again, but will also interleave the log messages from revisions which were merged. Merged revisions are shown in grey because they represent changes made on a different part of the tree.

Of course, merging is never simple! During feature development on the branch there will probably be occasional merges back from trunk to keep the branch in sync with the main line code. So the merge history of the branch will also include another layer of merge history. These different layers are shown in the log dialog using indentation levels.

Revision properties are completely different from the Subversion properties of each item. Revprops are descriptive items which are associated with one specific revision number in the repository, such as log message, commit date and committer name (author).

Sometimes you might want to change a log message you once entered, maybe because there's a spelling error in it or you want to improve the message or change it for other reasons. Or you want to change the author of the commit because you forgot to set up authentication or...

Subversion lets you change revision properties any time you want. But since such changes can't be undone (those changes are not versioned) this feature is disabled by default. To make this work, you must set up a pre-revprop-change hook. Please refer to the chapter on Hook Scripts in the Subversion Book for details about how to do that. Read Section 3.3, “Server side hook scripts” to find some further notes on implementing hooks on a Windows machine.

Once you've set up your server with the required hooks, you can change the author and log message (or any other revprop) of any revision, using the context menu from the top pane of the Log dialog. You can also edit a log message using the context menu for the middle pane.

	Warning
	Because Subversion's revision properties are not versioned, making modifications to such a property (for example, the svn:log commit message property) will overwrite the previous value of that property forever.

	Important
	Since TortoiseSVN keeps a cache of all the log information, edits made for author and log messages will only show up on your local installation. Other users using TortoiseSVN will still see the cached (old) authors and log messages until they refresh the log cache.

If you want to restrict the log messages to show only those you are interested in rather than scrolling through a list of hundreds, you can use the filter controls at the top of the Log Dialog. The start and end date controls allow you to restrict the output to a known date range. The search box allows you to show only messages which contain a particular phrase.

Click on the search icon to select which information you want to search in, and to choose regex mode. Normally you will only need a simple sub-string search, but if you need to more flexible search terms, you can use regular expressions. If you hover the mouse over the box, a tooltip will give hints on how to use the regex functions, or the sub-string functions. The filter works by checking whether your filter string matches the log entries, and then only those entries which match the filter string are shown.

Simple sub-string search works in a manner similar to a search engine. Strings to search for are separated by spaces, and all strings must match. You can use a leading - to specify that a particular sub-string is not found (invert matching for that term), and you can use ! at the start of the expression to invert matching for the entire expression. You can use a leading + to specify that a sub-string should be included, even if previously excluded with a -. Note that the order of inclusion/exclusion is significant here. You can use quote marks to surround a string which must contain spaces, and if you want to search for a literal quotation mark you can use two quotation marks together as a self-escaping sequence. Note that the backslash character is not used as an escape character and has no special significance in simple sub-string searches. Examples will make this easier:

Alice Bob -Eve

searches for strings containing both Alice and Bob but not Eve

Alice -Bob +Eve

searches for strings containing both Alice but not Bob, or strings which contain Eve.

-Case +SpecialCase

searches for strings which do not contain Case, but still include strings which contain SpecialCase.

!Alice Bob

searches for strings which do not contain both Alice and Bob

!-Alice -Bob

do you remember De Morgan's theorem? NOT(NOT Alice AND NOT Bob) reduces to (Alice OR Bob).

"Alice and Bob"

searches for the literal expression “Alice and Bob”

""

searches for a double-quote anywhere in the text

"Alice says ""hi"" to Bob"

searches for the literal expression “Alice says "hi" to Bob”.

Describing the use of regular expression searches is beyond the scope of this manual, but you can find online documentation and a tutorial at http://www.regular-expressions.info/ .

Note that these filters act on the messages already retrieved. They do not control downloading of messages from the repository.

You can also filter the path names in the bottom pane using the Show only affected paths checkbox. Affected paths are those which contain the path used to display the log. If you fetch the log for a folder, that means anything in that folder or below it. For a file it means just that one file. Normally the path list shows any other paths which are affected by the same commit, but in grey. If the box is checked, those paths are hidden.

Sometimes your working practices will require log messages to follow a particular format, which means that the text describing the changes is not visible in the abbreviated summary shown in the top pane. The property tsvn:logsummary can be used to extract a portion of the log message to be shown in the top pane. Read Section 4.17.2, “TortoiseSVN Project Properties” to find out how to use this property.

	No Log Formatting from Repository Browser
	Because the formatting depends upon accessing subversion properties, you will only see the results when using a checked out working copy. Fetching properties remotely is a slow operation, so you will not see this feature in action from the repo browser.

The Statistics button brings up a box showing some interesting information about the revisions shown in the Log dialog. This shows how many authors have been at work, how many commits they have made, progress by week, and much more. Now you can see at a glance who has been working hardest and who is slacking ;-)

4.9.9.2. Commits by Author Page

Figure 4.21. Commits-by-Author Histogram

This graph shows you which authors have been active on the project as a simple histogram, stacked histogram or pie chart.

Figure 4.22. Commits-by-Author Pie Chart

Where there are a few major authors and many minor contributors, the number of tiny segments can make the graph more difficult to read. The slider at the bottom allows you to set a threshold (as a percentage of total commits) below which any activity is grouped into an Others category.

4.9.9.3. Commits by date Page

Figure 4.23. Commits-by-date Graph

This page gives you a graphical representation of project activity in terms of number of commits and author. This gives some idea of when a project is being worked on, and who was working at which time.

When there are several authors, you will get many lines on the graph. There are two views available here: normal, where each author's activity is relative to the base line, and stacked, where each author's activity is relative to the line underneath. The latter option avoids the lines crossing over, which can make the graph easier to read, but less easy to see one author's output.

By default the analysis is case-sensitive, so users PeterEgan and PeteRegan are treated as different authors. However, in many cases user names are not case-sensitive, and are sometimes entered inconsistently, so you may want DavidMorgan and davidmorgan to be treated as the same person. Use the Authors case insensitive checkbox to control how this is handled.

Note that the statistics cover the same period as the Log dialog. If that is only displaying one revision then the statistics will not tell you very much.

Figure 4.24. Go Offline Dialog

If the server is not reachable, and you have log caching enabled you can use the log dialog and revision graph in offline mode. This uses data from the cache, which allows you to continue working although the information may not be up-to-date or even complete.

Here you have three options:

The Make this the default checkbox prevents this dialog from re-appearing and always picks the option you choose next. You can still change (or remove) the default after doing this from TortoiseSVN → Settings.

If you want to check the server again for newer log messages, you can simply refresh the view using F5. If you are using the log cache (enabled by default), this will check the repository for newer messages and fetch only the new ones. If the log cache was in offline mode, this will also attempt to go back online.

If you are using the log cache and you think the message content or author may have changed, you can use Shift-F5 or Ctrl-F5 to re-fetch the displayed messages from the server and update the log cache. Note that this only affects messages currently shown and does not invalidate the entire cache for that repository.