How to add New Files to VSS

[rob_manger]

Hi Guys,

I have yet another VSS action problem which is probably a limitation of the ss.exe. My VBP script checks files out, copies new files over the top of the checked out files, then checks in the changes. The problem lies in what to do with New Files.

The problems are:
- "Check In" can not, as far as I can see, remove local copies, ie: leaving only new files that can be added in the next step.
- Adding files that already exist in VSS generates an error. I do not wish to "Ignore Errors" if possible.

Can anyone tell me how to isolate the new files for addition into the VSS project?

Regards

Rob Manger
robm@devtest.com

[kinook]

To ensure repeatable and consistent builds, I would recommend that your build process only use what is retrieved from source control for builds. I'm not sure where you're copying files from after checkout, but that sounds dangerous.

The recommended procedure would be to require developers to manually add new files to VSS when they check in changes to a project (when using the VSS IDE integration in VS6 or VS.NET, I believe it will prompt for doing this when adding an item to a project).

The SourceSafe.bld sample demonstrates automating bulk adding (for instance, to populate a new database from a local directory tree or to add a new project and all its files), but if you wanted to automate adding of new files to an existing VSS project, that is not so simple and there's nothing built-in to do it for you (other than possibly ignoring errors as you mentioned). You would need to write script code to parse and compare the local directory tree w/ VSS and then generate add steps for any missing files (skipping files that wouldn't normally be placed in source control).

[rob_manger]

Thanx for the reply,

The reason for the copying is that due to the nature of the project, it is required that the majority of the developers continually disconnect from the domain in order to Unit test on multiple private domains. Because of this, many problems were encountered with the link to VSS, which we won't go into here.

Instead of wasting time on this problem we have come up with the work-around of automating the copying files to a secure, reliable location for check in into VSS before the actual build and labeling process begins.

While I agree that it IS dangerous and I have spent a fair bit of time trying to solve the problem, there was no fore-seeable solution, hence the work-around. At least with an automated process, it is more reliable than any manual action.

Cheers,

Rob Manger
robm@devtest.com