TFS: Find a moved file by the old name

Question

is there a way to get the version-history of a file if you only know an old name of the file?

I am currently looking at an old copy of our repository (I don't know the exact date, the copy was taken). When I compare it to the current repository, there is one file, that only exists in the copy, but not in the current repository. It has not been deleted in the repository. I guess, it has been moved or renamed. Is there any way in TFS to find the version-history using the old path and name?

I know that I could dig around using the name or some code-fragments. But IMO this is not an acceptable solution when using a repository :)

Thank you very much

Andreas

Answer 1

A couple of simple approaches (not already suggested in other answers) may help:

In your new repository, go to the folder that used to contain the old file, right click and show History. This will show all the versioned changes to files in that folder. Now look through the list of changes for files that no longer exist in the folder, and double click them to view them and determine if the file looks like an ancestorof your new file.

Or go for a brute force approach: get all the source code onto your disk and search for files of the same name, or files with some of the same text in them, as the file you're looking for (I'd look for comments that seem like they might be faily old and which use a distinctive wording that is unlikely to have appeared in many places. Comments are less likely to have changed than class/method names that might have been refactored if the file was renamed)

Grep may be an ugly, brute force way of approaching the problem, but sometimes it's the quickest and easiest. The TFS CLI tools are powerful, but unhelpful, complex and poorly documented, so unless you're already an expert, they can take a lot of trial and error to get them to do what you want.

Answer 2

In Team Explorer 2010, you can simply turn on the "Show Deleted Files" option and navigate to the original folder, you'll be able to then see the file that was moved or deleted. You can view history on the item to see its last changeset - this will show you whether it was outright deleted, or if it was just renamed and thus the item no longer exists in the current path name (aka "slot") and was deleted that way. You can further drill down in to changeset details for that changeset to see the new path name (slot) that item occupies.

As you mention, you could certainly do this with a little bash against the TFS API using the GetItems method. Though I understand that it's not what you want to do, I thought it worth saying just because the TFS API is surprisingly easy to work with.