Team Foundation Server Eclipse Plugin Settings and files encoding

Question

Hello.

I would like to know, how TFS plugin determine what encoding to use while checking files in TFS? Does it respect Eclipse Workspace settings and Projects settings? Also, there no way to manually set encoding to use - for now theres no "auto"-way to say to plugin: "always use UTF8-encoding for java-files in this project" nor there such ability in VS2010. It can be done only manually file by file via context menu and file properties - but it's a pain.

I would like to have ability manually override encoding used for check-in/check-out operations for all files within projects. For example, i have a project commited some times ago in TFS. While developing I start getting some source files in TFS marked as UTF8-encoded (which is my default) and some files in win-1251 codepage. Obviously latest is somebody fault - maybe "autodetect encoding" feature in VS2010 or people factor - but we have to have the way to fix it, right?. Nevertheless, in my project all source files are still physically stays encoded in UTF-8 - even those which in TFS marked as win-1251. But it makes worse when i start compare files - all Russian characters always marked as changed in compare result and as result I have all my files with such letters marked as different and pended for check-in.

So, how can i control all my files encoding within plugin and without manually set encoding on server-side file by file?

Answer 1

Hi Dmitriy,

I can imagine how annoying this could be when dealing with non-English characters, but unfortunetly the plugin does not take into consideration the project settings or Eclipse settings, so there is no easy way of doing this from the plugin, you have to do it file by file. Another option is that you can use the command line client while checking out the files and specify the encoding. For example, if you want to override the encoding used when checking-out all the java files in some project project1, you can run "tf checkout localpath\project1\*.java -recursive -type:UTF-8", in this case all the java files in this local path will be checked out and their encoding will be changed to UTF-8.

Hope that helps.

Let me know if you have another questions.

 

Thanks

Mireille