Short guide to SVN + Eclipse
First of all -- this guide is meant to be helpful (rather than exhaustive), and descibes one approach to getting an SVN project up and running in Eclipse. There may be nicer ways of doing this (by all means, tell us!) but these simple few steps should at least get the job done. The reason for writing this guide is that most information you'll find on the web only covers how to check out an already existing project in Eclipse, which is not what you want in this case -- you actually want to create a new one!
Getting SVN accounts
Send a polite email to Support and ask for one that both you and your partner can access, where you also state the course code since they use that to create the repository location. Nothing else to it!
Creating the folders
We will create a few folders, so we can have the whole project in the SVN. This will allow us to use the nifty collaboration features of SVN even for writing the report(s), and so forth. To do this, check out the project as instructed in the email you got from support. Go into the folder you just checked out and start making folders using svn mkdir folder_name (note that we add svn to the command, so SVN will automatically "add" the directories and create its metadata). Be clever about the directory structure, remaking it is possible but slightly painful. Say that you make a folder structure as follows:
project/ report/ design-plan/
In this structure, we intend to place the source code and libraries and everything else belonging to the project in (surprise) the project folder. Note that Eclipse will create the src/ and bin/ folders on its own as subfolders, so you do not need to create these.
Commit your directories
This step is so important it got its own header. Make sure that you run the svn commit command. If you are greeted with your favourite editor and asked to enter a commit message for the folder structure you just created, then everything is fine. If not, redo! Write a message and save and exit the editor.
In Eclipse
- Choose "Import" from the "File" menu.
- Choose to import from SVN.
- Create a "new repository location". You should figure out the parameters using the information in the email you got from support.
- Right click on the thing in the next window, and choose "Refresh". You should now be able to see the folders you created. Choose the one that should contain the source code (in this example, the one called project/) and hit Next.
- Make sure that "Check out as new project configured using the New Project Wizard" is checked, and hit Finish.
- Now, configure a Java project just as normal. When you hit Finish, you'll probably get a warning about the folder not containing a .project file -- this is fine (and actually the point, but this goes over Eclipse's head).
- The first thing should do now is right click on the project in your project list and go to "Team" and "Commit...", so you upload all the Eclipse-specific files with project metadata.
- Once the commit completes, your partner should be able to check out the project, and will get the Eclipse project metadata as well.
Disclaimer
This is pretty much the procedure we use when we create projects, and we don't really know much else about Eclipse and SVN integration. We can't really help beyond these steps, but hopefully, they will work for you or at least give you a good starting point to investigate from using some web search engine.