Add Subversion revision to included Javascript and CSS files

Question

I'm looking adding Subversion's revision number to the name of each .js file we include, so whenever the .js file is updated, the browsers will automatically fetch the new version. I believe Stackoverflow does this, but I wonder how. Is this part of the release procedure? Any hints on how to achieve this using Subversion tools?

Answer 1

There is no standard way to have Subversion add the revision to the file name. Use a build tool (for example, ant) and a custom target for this.

Answer 2

If you set the SVN Keyword "Revision" on the file which declares the tag, then the literal text $Revision$ becomes a SVN keyword. Each time you update the working copy, $Revision$ will update to read $Revision 1234 $ where 1234 is the current revision number.

Just be forewarned, we have run into problems with IE6 using this approach. We had put for all our tags (and applied the SVN Revision keyword to them) so that every time we push a new copy of code out to our production boxes, we know all clients will get the current revision. But IE6 sometimes creates weird errors when this happens; as though you were missing some of those script tags. In the end we took them out because it caused us more problems with IE6 than it ever solved us.