Renaming folders in TFS

Question

I have a folder in Team Foundation Server with several sub-folders:

• candidates
  • beta1
  • beta2
  • rc1
  • ga

I'd like to move three of them under a new folder:

• candidates
  • defunct
    • beta1
    • beta2
    • rc1
  • ga

Each folder contains tens of thousands of files of various sizes. They are all branches of some other folder. I don't have them checked out in my working folder, but they are under a mapped folder.

The Rename option is greyed out in TFS. When I try to rename beta1 to defunct\beta1, the TF command says:

The item $/blah/candidates/beta1 could not be found in your workspace.

I've tried getting a single file beneath beta1, but that doesn't fix it.

I've also tried specifying the full paths starting with $. And if I unmap this location from my workspace, it complains that it could not determine the workspace (even though I'm telling it two paths on the server.)

I get the crazy impression that I will have to physically download about 100,000 files, just so I can tell the server to rename some folders above them! This cannot possibly be true, in a sane world. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Okay, it's not as bad as I thought!

If I say:

tf get beta1

and so on, for each of the sub-folders, it only gets the files immediately under that folder. This isn't anything like as bad. And then the Rename command appears enabled in the GUI.

Answer 2

The other option is to use a one-level workspace mapping. Unlike the non-recursive "Get", this can be done entirely from the UI.

Further reading:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc138514.aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/buckh/archive/2007/03/04/tfs-workspaces-2005-and-orcas.aspx