Folder differences with overridden working folders

[John C]

Say I have a top-level folder in Vault called 'Top' that contains a child folder called 'Child'. If I set 'Top's working folder to be C:\Top and do a recursive Get then show differences (against the current version in the repository) on 'Top', I see that everything is identical.

However, if I go in and change the working folder of 'Child' to be C:\Child and do a recursive Get from Top again (and make sure I delete C:\Top\Child first), then when I show the differences for 'Top' the resulting page on DiffMerge says that 'Child' is 'Right Only' meaning it's in Vault, but not on my local machine. This would lead me to believe that when it's doing the Diff it's not checking in the working folder for Child, it's just looking inside the working folder for Top and recursing from there.

I'm guessing this is by design but is there any way to resolve the overridden working directories when doing a 'diff'? At present, if we want to compare a checked-out copy of our repository we have to do the top-level, then each of the 'right only' projects separately.

[lbauer]

You're right that the diff tool shows proper results only when the working folder directory structure is the same as in the folder tree.

I don't know of a workaround, other than the folder-by-folder comparison.

I'll log a feature request for folder diff to show results even when the child working folders are in non-recursive locations.

[dan]

This is a tough one, because our diff isn't actually integrated with Vault - it is a separate app so that users can use their favorite diff tool if the want. The downside is that it doesn't know anything about working folders - just the "root" working folder.

Another partial way to see what is different between the working folder and the repository is to use the Search pane in the client, and search on Any Status - it will produce a list of files that are different in some way, and you should be able to diff from there.

[John C]

Yeah, the search pane option should do the trick nicely for what we need. I'll check with the rest of the team tomorrow. Thanks!