Subversion Log Queries

I want to show off how good Subversion is as a source control system, and one of it's strengths is the vast amount of information you can get about the code that is in your repository. At a previous employer we had a very cool set of old style ASP pages that tied our source repository to our timesheet system to make some extremely useful reports. To make a start at trying to recreate these reports in subversion, I needed to be able to query the subversion logs.

Rather than relying on having the svn command line client installed, or using SharpSVN which I found a bit unsatisfactory for querying logs I thought I'd have a bash at writing a standalone HTTP client in .Net. After a bit of searching for some documentation, I came up with the following fairly simple code:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    var sandpiperUri = new Uri(@"https://sandpiper.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/sandpiper");
    var request = WebRequest.Create(sandpiperUri + "/!svn/vcc/default");
    request.Method = "REPORT";
    request.ContentType = "text/xml";
    var requestbody = "<S:log-report xmlns:S=\"svn:\"><S:start-revision>2</S:start-revision>" +
        "<S:end-revision>2</S:end-revision></S:log-report>";
    request.ContentLength = requestbody.Length;
    using (var requestStream = request.GetRequestStream())
    {
        using (var writer = new StreamWriter(requestStream))
        {
            writer.Write(requestbody);
        }
    }
    using (var response = request.GetResponse())
    {
        using (var responseStream = response.GetResponseStream())
        {
            using (var reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()))
            {
                Console.WriteLine(reader.ReadToEnd());
            }
        }
    }
    Console.ReadLine();
}

This code queries the log of my rarely updated sourceforge project and produces the following results:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<S:log-report xmlns:S="svn:" xmlns:D="DAV:">
<S:log-item>
<D:version-name>2</D:version-name>
<D:comment>Initial Commit of Pre-Alpha Code</D:comment>
<D:creator-displayname>davebrunger</D:creator-displayname>
<S:date>2008-02-02T10:08:17.918376Z</S:date>
</S:log-item>
</S:log-report>

Now all I have to do is parse the ouput and create a nice interface to call the code. Oh yes, and implement some more of the subversion report features.

For information on the subversion http interface see this file: http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/notes/webdav-protocol.