How do I resolve the root and relative paths of TFS folders on the server?

Question

I have created a CodeActivity for use in (custom) build definitions. This activity needs to copy files located on the server to/from places like the \'source directory\', \

Answer 1

Let me preface this answer by saying that there's a lot of terminology overload going on, so I want to define a few things:

• Server path: the path to the file or folder in the version control system. For example, $/Test/BuildResources is a server path. This is an absolute server path, it is not relative.
• Local path: the path that you have mapped the server path to on your machine. For example, D:\Test\BuildResources or /home/me/test/buildresources is a local path.
• Mapping: the correspondence between the server paths and local paths - so that TFVC knows where to put files on your local machine when you do a "get".

I define this not to be pedantic, but because having the terminology correct will be helpful when using the TFS SDK, which will let you query the local path for a given server path (and vice versa) easily. (You should not simply concatenate path components together, since TFVC allows for very complex workspace mappings.)

To get started with the TFS SDK, you first need to find the server connection information. If you have a given local path (in this case, your SourcesDirectory) you can use that to read the workspace cache and get the information you need for the server connection that the build server has created:

// Get the workspace information for the build server's workspace
var workspaceInfo = Workstation.Current.GetLocalWorkspaceInfo(sourcesDirectory);

// Get the TFS Team Project Collection information from the workspace cache
// information then load the TFS workspace itself.
var server = new TfsTeamProjectCollection(workspaceInfo.serverUri);
var workspace = workspaceInfo.GetWorkspace(server);

Once you have a workspace, you can query it for the path mappings. It will do the necessary translation from server to local path based on your workspace mappings. For example:

workspace.GetServerItemForLocalItem("D:\My\Local\Path");

and

workspace.GetLocalItemForServerItem("$/My/Server/Path");

This mechanism will only work, however, if your build definition actually sets up the workspace to include these files. If you need some directory $/Foo/Bar, you will need to make sure that it is included in the Source Settings details tab of the Build Definition.