In Subversion, both files and directories are versioned and have a history. If you want to examine the history for a selected resource and find out what happened at a certain revision, what has been changed regarding that resource and who did the changes, drop the modifications made in a certain revision, check out / update the resource to a selected revision, compare two revisions of the same file and other actions, you have to use the Show history action. This is available from any of the three views: Repository view menu, Working copy view menu or Synchronize view menu. From the Repository view you can display the log history regarding any remote resource residing in repository. From the Working copy view you can display the history of local versioned resources. From the Synchronize view you can show the history of any incoming or outgoing resources.
The view itself consists of three distinct areas:
The revision table showing revision numbers, date/time of revision, name of the author, as well as the first line of the commit message. You can click on any revision to show its full details.
The list of resources affected by this revision (modified, added, deleted or changed properties).
The commit message for the selected revision.
The Resource history view does not always show all the changes ever made to a resource because for a large repository there may be thousands of changes and retrieving the entire list can take a long time. Normally you are interested in the more recent ones and that is why the number of revisions is limited by default from the options to 50. This can be changed by accessing the Preferences->SVN page.
![[Note]](img/note.gif) | Note |
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When using Subversion servers older than version 1.2, a history request may take a very long time because the server will reply with the entire history even if you limited the number of entries to a smaller number. |