How do I find the history for a renamed folder in TFS 2010?

I came across this question while responding to some customer suggestions, so I thought I should make the answer easy to find should others be wondering the same thing…

In the UI, history of folders is recursive - always.  This is because most of the time, users care about the history of the contents of the folder.  Files on the other hand don’t have the concept of recursive history - you always see the history for the file itself.  Now, from the command line, there is an option to show recursive history (/r) and if you run “tf history” on a folder without the recursive option, you'll see the changes to the folder itself.  This would include changes such as a rename for the folder itself.

 

As for getting this in the UI in VS - we've heard multiple requests for this, and we're tracking it as a possible feature for the next release.

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 05, 2010
  Would love to see this in the UI. ++for the feature in the next release.

• Anonymous
  April 06, 2011
  This still doesn't really explain the problem I don't think - if the history of folders in the UI were always recursive, wouldn't it still work even if the folder had been moved/renamed (since the files retain their history)? Anyway, very much hoping the UI will allow us to see the full history of folders even after they are renamed soon.  I can't see anything in SP1 addressing this, however :(

• Anonymous
  December 14, 2012
  So how exactly do I see the history of the content of the folder, exactly, across the renames and branching? I know how to do it for each file. But what I is all files under a certain current root.