Files under source control drop out of project

[ntimmerman]

It's difficult to know if this is a VS bug or a Vault bug, but I figured I'd post it here just in case anyone has experienced the same issue.

First things first: we're running Vault 5.0.2 both on the server and as our client. We use both the Windows client and the Visual Studio plugin, but mostly the VS plugin for convenience.

Every now and again, a file within our project will disappear from the project in VS. However, the file is still in the directory and still in source control. When we go to the directory in Windows Explorer, we can drag and drop it back into the project and it sure enough, it has the little green check mark showing it as still in source control.

Anyone experience this and have any idea what could be happening? It's not frequent but it is annoying.

[lbauer]

That's strange. We haven't had other reports of this. Is there any kind of pattern to this? Does this happen only in certain types of projects or with certain types of files? if you open the project file with notepad, is the file listed there as being part of the project?

What happens if you click refresh in solution Explorer? Or try refreshing source control status under the File menu-> Fortress source control-> Refresh source control status.

[ntimmerman]

I've had it happen with two types of projects so far:

SSRS 2005 in BIDS 2005
ASP.NET 3.5 Web Application in VS 2008

It could be user error on our part but nobody on my team thinks so. We'll report back when it happens again with more specifics if we can derive any.

Thanks.

[lbauer]

It might be helpful to have a client-side log that captures this event.

If you are using the Visual Studio Enhanced Client with VS 2005/2008, you can enable logging in VS under Tools->Options->Source Control->Integration Options. The log will be in your user's temp directory. The caveat is that the log can get very large, so you may want to delete regularly until you get the error again.

[ntimmerman]

I've figured it out and I can provide steps to reproduce now.

First create a Report Server Project in Visual Studio 2005 or "Business Intelligence Development Studio 2005" (Microsoft is dumb for giving it another name in SQL Server installs). Bind the project to source control using the enhanced client. Now create a new report. You'll see the little yellow plus icon next to your new report as you would with any controlled file type in a source controlled solution. However, in the case of report server projects, the root node in the solution explorer is at this time still a green check. In other solutions, such as a web application, the moment you add a new file, this modifies the project file and thus on that root node it shows the little blue box with black "I" through it to indicate the project file was modified.

The way to get the file to disappear is to get latest and select overwrite and then your file disappears from the solution because you got the project file that doesn't know about your new report. The report doesn't get deleted in the file system so you just need to drag and drop it back into the solution. It will show the green check because it matches what's in source control but then at that point you still need to check in your project file or it will just disappear again and again.

So what's happening is that we usually intuitively know that if you add a file, you have to check in the project file, and also we usually check in from the root node anyway to check in all changes as one transaction atomically. However, sometimes, because that icon's showing the wrong thing, every now and again, someone fails to realize the need to check in the project file.

So the only bug with vault is just the little icon on the root node of Report Server projects in VS 2005 not being changed right away to indicate to the developer that the project file has been modified. We're working around it by always checking in from the root node and just being aware of the issue.

[lbauer]

Thanks for the details. I was able to reproduce this and have logged bug 15196 in our item tracking database. We'll fix it in a future maintenance release.

I noted that you're using CVS mode. In VSS mode, adding the report causes the project file to be checked out , so the user has some idea that it might be modified.