Would you like to associate each of your subversion check-ins with a particular issue, bug or change request? TortoiseSVN provides an easy way to link revisions to issues in any bug tracking system.

To accomplish this, TortoiseSVN needs to know some information about your bug tracking system. Since TortoiseSVN resides on the client, this information needs to be stored somewhere locally. This is accomplished by adding properties to your SVN controlled folders. Once these properties are added, Tortoise knows to expose an additional textbox to allow you to enter the associated issue identifiers. With this information, Tortoise will add a well defined line to your comment that is both human readable, and that it can easily parse. (Full technical details available here.)

You can add these properties, by right clicking the root folder for your project and selecting TortoiseSVN->Properties. As you add each property, be sure to check the “Apply Property Recursively” checkbox.

Here is a screen shot of the properties and example of their typical values:

bugtraq:label is the label that appears next to the textbox for entering issue identifiers. This label also appears as a header for a new column when viewing the log. Note: you can specify multiple identifiers separated by a comma.

bugtraq:warnifnoissue can be set to true to warn a user that they have not entered anything in the textbox.

bugtraq:number can be set to do validation on the new textbox. Setting to true will only allow the entry of numeric values. (Note that the checkin shown in the screen shot above would not be permitted with this value set to true. This will be dependent on your bug tracking system.)

bugtraq:message is the format of the message that is appended to your comments. This example uses “Issue ID: %BUGID%”. %BUGID% will be replaced with the actual value you enter in the text box.