Skip to main content

Destroy old data in TFS

Team Foundation Server only performs soft deletes and the files are very easy to recover just by performing an undelete. After a while the deleted files may use a lot of unneccesary space. From TFS 2008 it is possible to erase the data from the database. On option would be to use tf.exe and the destroy command. That however will be pretty tedious when there is more than one file that should be destroyed. I have created a small application to help with this task.

The TFS communication is handled in a separate class which i very simple without any error handling.

using System;
using System.Net;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Common;

namespace TFSCleanupTool
{
    internal class TFS
    {
        private string ServerName = null;
        private VersionControlServer VersionControl = null;

        internal TFS(string servername)
        {
            ServerName = servername;
        }

        internal void Connect(string domain, string username, string password)
        {
            TeamFoundationServer server = new TeamFoundationServer(ServerName, new NetworkCredential(username, password, domain));
            server.Authenticate();
            VersionControl = (VersionControlServer)server.GetService(typeof(VersionControlServer));
        }

        internal Item[] GetDeletedItems(string path)
        {
            ItemSet itemSet = VersionControl.GetItems(path, VersionSpec.Latest, RecursionType.Full, DeletedState.Deleted, ItemType.Any);
            return itemSet.Items;
        }

        internal void DestroyDeletedItem(Item item)
        {
            ItemSpec itemSpec = new ItemSpec(item.ServerItem, RecursionType.Full, item.DeletionId);
            VersionControl.Destroy(itemSpec, VersionSpec.Latest, null, DestroyFlags.None);
        }
    }
}

Usage of this class is very simple and this is just sample.

TFS tfs = new TFS("server");
tfs.Connect("domain", "username", "password");
Item[] items = tfs.GetDeletedItems("$/");
foreach(Item item in items)
{
    tfs.DestroyDeletedItem(item);
}

This class only handles already deleted files. It is possible to destroy non-deleted files as well, but I do not really see the point in that. Keep in mind that the data will be permanently removed and cannot be restored, so be careful! Always back up the TfsVersionControl database before using the destroy methods.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Cornball goes to Brunch with Chaplin

Lately I've been working pretty hard on different projects but not really stumbling upon anything blogworthy. The most recent project is quite interesting though, a single page, touch friendly, web application using the latest and greatest technologies. We've ended up with using Brunch with Chaplin , which is a very neat way of setting up a Backbone based single page web project with Brunch and Chaplin . Aside from this, I have my own little project that has lived on for almost 15 years already, The Cornball . From being a plain Windows application written i C an Win32 API, it has been ported to .NET using WPF, and is currently a Silverlight application hosted on Windows Azure. I could not find a better time to reanimate this project and create a new web based version, touch friendly, super optimized, awesome in any way. So I did... So please follow my journey at Github . It's going to take a while, I assure you, but I already have some ground work done. Meanwhile,...
2 comments
Read more

Bindable RichTextBox with HTML conversion in WPF

In WPF , the RichTextBox  control is not really like other controls. Due to its flexible nature, there is no built in way of binding a property to the content. In this case, I wanted a simple  RichTextBox  control with a binding to an HTML formatted string to be able to use the built-in formatting features of the  RichTextBox  and allow users to create simple HTML formatted content. First, doing the conversion on-the-fly proved to have major performance issues, so I ended up binding the content to a XAML string. The XAML to HTML conversion can be performed at any time. I created a UserControl with a bindable Text-property. The view contains a  RichTextBox  control. <RichTextBox x:Name="richTextBox" TextChanged="OnRichTextBoxChanged"> The source code for the user control contains the Text property and the methods to handle the binding. public static readonly DependencyProperty TextProperty = DependencyProperty.Register( "Te...
Post a Comment
Read more

Binding Enum with DescriptionAttribute in WPF

Binding an enumeration to a ComboBox can be done in several ways. In most cases you don't want to display the value itself, but a more user friendly description. One common approach is to use the DescriptionAttribute on the Enum values to supply a description for each value.  This is all possible in a very MVVM friendly way. First step is to add the  DescriptionAttribute  to the values of the enumeration. public enum MyValues { [Description("First value")] First, [Description("Second value")] Second } To retrieve the description from the enum we use a simple extension method. This method returns the value of the DescriptionAttribute if it exists, otherwise the string representation of the enum value is returned. public static string GetDescription(this Enum value) { var fieldInfo = value.GetType().GetField(value.ToString()); var attribute = fieldInfo.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(DescriptionAttribute), false).FirstOrDefault() as ...
2 comments
Read more