Reaching the search scope limit for history search in the Web Interface

Applies to: VisualSVN Server 5.0 and later

Symptom

The following warning may be displayed when using History search in the web interface:

Search scope is too wide, results may be incomplete.

Note

This article describes the above-mentioned warning specifically for History search.

For a similar warning during a different type of search (such as for a Content search or for the suggested file and folder names directly in the search box) see the respective articles:

Cause

History search is the search within commit log messages and commit authors, to find matching commits.

For a history search, the current scope is the length of history that you are searching through. This scope is based on the location (folder or file) that is currently opened in the Web UI, because it includes only the history of this location (folder/file). In other words, this scope includes only the revisions that made changes within the file/folder currently opened in the Web UI. This scope starts from the revision that you are currently browsing in the Web UI (by default, from the newest/HEAD revision) and goes towards older revisions in the history.

The "Search scope is too wide, results may be incomplete" warning means that this history of the current location is too long and that not all of it has been searched for the current query.

Currently, a history search query is limited to searching 200,000 most recent revisions within the current scope, beginning from the revision you are currently switched to in the Web UI and searching towards older revisions. Any revisions that fall beyond that limit (are older) are ignored and not included in the search results.

Resolution

To ensure that the search results are complete, try reducing the current scope of history, until the results no longer display the "search scope is too wide" message. You can reduce the scope of history in two ways:

Narrow down the location whose history you search, by navigating to a more specific repository location in the Web UI. For example, if the repository contains multiple projects, navigate to the folder of a particular project in the Web UI. Start the search from there, to search just the history of this project.
Start the search from an older revision. Switch to an older revision, and start a history search from it. The search will go from that revision number towards the even older revisions. This can be useful for searching the oldest revisions in a repository with a particularly long revision history.

Technical background

The history search is designed to work even in huge repositories with extremely long history, while observing the potentially granular user access permissions set on files and folders and while filtering the scope of history based on the location opened in the Web UI. The search workload is distributed in a special way between the server and the Web UI. However, the above-mentioned limit of 200,000 latest revisions within the current scope is set for a history search query.

Search results when the search scope was too wide

If the search has stopped prematurely due to the search scope limit, then the search results may be incomplete, which may produce a false negative result, because they include only the matches that had been found up until the point when the search stopped due to the scope limit. That is to say, the warning about incomplete search results means that:

If no results at all have been found for your query, matches might actually exist within the current search scope, however the search had stopped before they could be found.
If any matches have been found, then not all the existing matches within the current search scope may have been found.