TDS Classic Deployment Property Manager 

When working with TDS Classic, you will eventually need to deploy your items to a Sitecore instance and you might not want the default behavior of every item in your TDS Classic project deploying every time. This is where the Deployment Property Manager comes in! You can open it by right-clicking on your TDS Classic project and selecting “Deployment Property Manager”. This will open the Deployment Property Manager dialog with all items in that project viewable. You may also open the dialog by right-clicking on any of the items in your TDS Classic project. This will narrow the scope to said item and its children.

The top part of the dialog contains a tree structure of the items in the project along with the settings currently selected for those items. The bottom portion of the dialog is where we can modify these settings.

The first property we can modify is the Item Deployment. This determines how TDS Classic will handle the item at deployment. There are two possible options:

• Deploy Once – TDS Classic will only deploy the item if that item doesn’t exist in Sitecore. If it does exist, TDS Classic will ignore the existing item.
• Deploy Always – TDS Classic will always deploy the item to Sitecore, overwriting the item if it is already in Sitecore.

The next property we can modify is the Child Item Synchronization. This tells TDS Classic how to manage the children Sitecore items that are not in the TDS Classic project. Here we have three options:

• None – TDS Classic will ignore any items that are descendants of the current item
• Synchronize All Children – TDS Classic will remove any descendants of the current item that are not stored in TDS Classic. If this option is selected all descendants of the current item will be updated to this setting.
• Synchronize Direct Descendants – TDS Classic will remove only the direct descendants of the current item that are not stored in TDS Classic.

The final property we can change is Exclude from Configuration. Selecting a checkbox next to the build configuration name will exclude the selected item and all its children from that build configuration.

Clicking the Set all Descendant Properties button will change all the properties of the currently selected item’s children to the same settings of the currently selected item. Clicking the Inherit Parent Properties button will update properties of the currently selected item to match the parent.

Tips for working with deployment properties

The default settings for an item added to your TDS Classic project will have Item Deployment set to Deploy Always and Child Item Synchronization set to None. But, if the item added to your TDS Classic project has a parent item already included in your TDS Classic project it will inherit its settings from the parent. 

When adding Sitecore items to your TDS Classic project that are part of a default Sitecore install, we recommend setting the Item Deploy to Deploy Once and the Child Item Synchronization to None. This will prevent TDS Classic from unnecessarily deploying items and may increase the speed of your deployments and item synching tasks.

If you have an item where only a portion of the fields need to be Deploy Always, take a look at the Field Level Deployment dialog. This can be opened by right-clicking on the item in your TDS Classic project and clicking on "Field Level Deployment". For example, this is useful for items that have content that needs to be editable, but also requires security permissions be applied. Just set your item to Deploy Once and in the Field Level Deployment dialog check the box for the __Security field.

For more tips and tricks on how to get the most our of TDS Classic, visit the blog or follow us on Twitter.