Using Subversion with Xcode, Part III

In Part I, I walked through the process of setting up repositories and projects in Subversion, Part II covered configuring Subversion with Xcode, this part will provide an overview of the SCM tools within Xcode and also show you how to tag and branch your code within Subversion.

Xcode SCM Attributes

If you have your project successfully configured for use with Subversion, once you check-out your files and make any changes Xcode will identify these changes with attributes. Once you start editing a file, an ‘M‘ will show up next to the file in the Groups & Files window. Also, if you add any files to your project these will be identified with a ‘?‘. These attributes will remain until your changes are committed or if you discard your changes.

Committing & Discarding Changes

If you are familiar with other version control systems, you might know committing as ‘check-in’ and discard as ‘undo check-out’. You can commit or discard changes at the file level by right-clicking each file or folder and making the selection or by selecting ‘SCM‘ from the menu and selecting commit or discard changes. The ‘SCM‘ menu also allows you to commit all the changes in your project by selecting ‘Commit Entire Project‘.

Other SCM Tools

The Xcode SCM Menu provides a couple of ways to easily compare the contents of any file that you have checked-out with any revisions committed in Subversion, using FileMerge and the Unix diff tool.

Compare

By selecting ‘Compare With’ from the ‘SCM‘ menu, Xcode will open the FileMerge application that will show each file side-by-side and indicate the differences between each file. In File Merge, you can choose to add or remove any lines in your checked-out file.

Diff

If you have had exposure to the diff tool in Unix/Linux, it is available as an option to use within Xcode. By selecting ‘Diff With‘ from the ‘SCM‘ menu, Xcode will execute the diff command with your currently checked-out file and the revision file that you specify as arguments. The results of this command will be displayed in the current code window.

Subversion Tagging

In Part I, I mentioned that Subversion also has the following folders: tags and branches. The tag folder is used for storing releases or stable builds of your code and allows you recall the correct version of the project files if you need to fix any bugs. Here is a script that will allow you to tag your project, it assumes that whatever the is currently committed in the trunk folder is what you want to tag:

Subversion Branching

The branches folder is used for storing code that you want to develop new functionality with or experiment on without making revisions to the code in the trunk. Here is a script that will allow you to branch your code, also it assumes that whatever the is currently committed in the trunk folder is what you want to branch.

I hope you enjoyed reading this 3 part tutorial on setting up Subversion within Xcode. Please share your thoughts on how you use Subversion or any other SCM system with your development environment.