Note Keyword expansion is by default disabled for all files. See your VSS administrator to enable keyword expansion.
Keyword expansion refers to VSS's ability to place certain information directly into your file to create a file header for you.
To do this, you place certain keywords into the text of your file, in comments so that they do not affect your code. When you add or check in the file, VSS looks for these keywords, and places the relevant information after them.
This topic describes the traditional way VSS expands keywords. With VSS, you can also expand keywords in a different way that makes using keywords with HTML files much more useful. See Use Keyword Expansion in HTML Files for details.
VSS Keywords
The following table is a list of all the VSS keywords. Some of the keywords are redundant, either for convenience or for backward compatibility with other version-control systems, such as RCS.
Note Keywords are case-sensitive, so be sure to capitalize them properly.
To expand keywords:
| Type this keyword | To add the following |
| $Archive: $ | VSS archive file location |
| $Author: $ | User who last changed the file |
| $Date: $ | Date and time of last checkin |
| $Header: $ | Logfile, Revision, Date, Author |
| $History: $ | File history, VSS format |
| $JustDate: $ | Date, without the time addendum. |
| $Log: $ | File history, RCS format |
| $Logfile: $ | Same as Archive |
| $Modtime: $ | Date and time of last modification |
| $Revision: $ | VSS version number |
| $Workfile: $ | File name |
| $NoKeywords: $ | No keyword expansion for all keywords that follow |
For example, you could place the following in a file:
$Revision: $
Upon checkin, VSS would replace it with:
$Revision: 23 $
The next time you check in the file, the 23 is replaced by a 24, and so on. Without running VSS, you can always look at the top of your file to see what version your copy of the file is.