When performing local moves (not under Plastic control), the "Pending changes" view checks the items that are no longer available and tries to match them with the private items to determine if it's the same item. A similarity algorithm is used for matching, so that items that were moved and changed are still detected as the same item.
The similarity value is displayed in the Similarity column. Only locally moved items have a value in this column. You can customize the similarity percentage (%).
Some time ago, we released a feature that may be helpful if you are performing refactors involving locally moved/deleted folders.
If you are doing especially big refactors, we recommend that you use the Plastic Change Tracker service. Moreover, use the Plastic Change Tracker if your refactoring involves binary renames or moves.
==== Release notes [6.0.16.1151] ===
An awesome new feature: Plastic Change Tracker service for Windows to precisely track file moves and renames beyond heuristic guessing. This new service takes advantage of the file system internals to precisely track file renames and moves, something we could only guess before (quite well, but just a heuristic after all).
This means binary file renames and moves (where diffing does not apply) will now be incredibly precise.
How to use it:
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Changes will only be precisely tracked while your client is open. You can do the changes directly in Explorer, but you need the Plastic client open. We plan to improve this later.
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Plastic Changes Tracker service must be enabled on your machine.
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How do you tell it is working? Well, every move won't be "moved locally" but just "moved" now because the change is applied immediately.
NOTES:
1. It only works in NTFS disks.
2. The USN journal needs to be active on your disk. (By default, it's already active in the same unit where Windows is installed).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USN_Journal
3. Enable it in your client.conf creating a new XML entry named: "UseChangeTrackerService", set it to YES.
4. After enabling this feature, restart the Plastic client and then you can disable the "Show manually/renamed items" option in the Pending Changes view. It will make this view faster as it won't need to match the locally moved items in your disk anymore.
5. Before you start a new refactor, run a small test to confirm it's properly working and remember that you need to keep the GUI open during the refactor to track the changes.
For future refactors:
- If we can't use controlled changes and you are going to locally move a large amount of files in large workspaces, let's use the "Plastic Change Tracker" feature. This way, we can disable the "manually moved items" option for the pending changes calculation making it faster and avoiding errors when matching the moved items.