Ankh: Why doesn’t “Add Solution To Repository” add all my projects?

The ”Add Solution To Subversion Repository” command in Ankh seems to be one of the greatest sources of confusion among Ankh users. They will often try to import one of their solutions and find that one or more of the projects are not included in the project. There is a message in the output pane stating that the project(s) could not be imported as they are not under the solution root. In snapshot 33, this was changed to display a warning dialog when projects in the solution were detected not to be under the solution root and allow the user to cancel out of the operation. This was added as the realization grew on me that this was causing a lot of users trouble.

So what is this “solution root”? Quite simply, it is the directory in which the solution file (.sln) is located. When performing the “Add Solution To…” command, Ankh will assume this is to be the root of the new working copy that is created. In other words, it will import projects that are located in directories beneath this directory (or in it), and omit those that are outside this directory.

Obviously, we could try to make a guess at some kind of common root that included all projects and use that. However, what if the projects are on different drives? Or if the only common root is the root of the drive? You really don’t want to import that. This is not an uncommon situation, with VS having a tendency to put web projects in C:inetpubwwwroot. Unfortunately, this cannot be easily dealt with, and there is also another complication with regards to this kind of solution layout.

Subversion does not allow you to commit items from two disjunct working copies in the same commit, even if the two working copies in question are from the same repository. So if you have parts of your project in a working copy under C:inetpubwwwroot and the remaining parts under D:Projects, the commit will fail if it includes files from both locations. This is not something Ankh can work around in a reasonable manner. At best we could detect the situation and display a warning before it happens, but such an operation would be rather complex for not much gain. After all, if the commit errors out, no actual damage is done to the working copy.

I can think of two scenarios where this limitation in “Add Solution To…” is a problem:

1. The solution has projects scattered all over (as in the above wwwroot example).
2. All of the projects are in a single tree, but the solution file is not in the root directory.

For the first scenario, the only thing you can currently do is import the projects using another Subversion client such as TortoiseSVN or the command line client, then set up the working copies as you want them. The limitation with regards to committing items from disjunct working copies will still apply, though. For this reason alone I recommend against doing this. Restructuring the source to be in a single tree is far preferable.

For the second scenario, again, using another Subversion client to do the initial import is an acceptable workaround. Ankh will pick up on a working copy no matter what as long as the solution directory is under Subversion control. However, I think Ankh could do more in this scenario by allowing the user to manually specify the common root that is to be imported. Recent refactorings in the Ankh source would also make this easier to achieve; in fact, it would be pretty easy.