Is there a way to get "p4v reconcile offline work"? - perforce

Is there a way to get "p4v reconcile offline work" to behave the same way as the command-line "p4 reconcile" when it comes to p4ignore?
I've read Can you "ignore" a directory in P4V? and https://community.perforce.com/s/article/1282 however the problem with those is they are not very flexible. We want different p4ignore files per project so having to either set absolute paths, change the p4v start-in directory, or set a fixed env variable ruin the flexibility.
Ideally, it would work identical to the command line where we create a p4config file in the root of a project and then point its p4ignore variable to a side-by-side p4ignore file which contains the ignore specifications.
Example:
p4config.txt
P4IGNORE=p4ignore.txt
p4ignore.txt
*.obj
If I run "p4 reconcile" from the command-line in the root folder of that project it will correctly reconcile everything but obj files.
If I run "p4v reconcile offline work" from the root folder of that project it will reconcile everything including the obj files which should have been ignored.
Any ideas?

Since P4V isn't open-source it's not possible to fix bugs in it yourself.
The answer to "how do I get P4V to do this thing the command line does" is generally "write a custom tool and use that instead of the built-in P4V command".

Related

P4V Get Latest does nothing

I do not want to go "Get Revision" > "Force". Because half of my stuff is already downloaded. I don't want to overwrite what I already have. P4V Can clearly see that what is in the depot and what is local is completely different. How can I get Perforce to retrieve the files I do not have, and ignore the ones I already do?
Select your workspace root, go to File > Open Command Window Here, and run:
p4 clean
This will scan your workspace and force-sync everything that's different or missing, as well as deleting unadded files. Note that if you have local work that isn't in a changelist, this will irrevocably erase it. If you only want to "clean" files that are edited/present but out of date (and disregard added/deleted files), do p4 clean -e instead. If you want to preview the operation before doing it for real, do p4 clean -n.
I think you can do the equivalent via the "Reconcile Offline Work" tool in P4V, but it may require additional manual steps.
To make working with Perforce easier, try to avoid modifying files in your workspace that are read-only -- if you want to remove a file from your workspace, use "remove from workspace" in P4V rather than manually deleting it, etc. Perforce is able to make file operations very fast by virtue of knowing what's in your workspace and not having to re-check it each time, but you eliminate that benefit when you mess with your workspace manually.
Instead of p4 clean, you could do:
reconcile offline work on root of workspace then a pop-up saying that you deleted some files and it is going to delete them from Depot of the server as well make sure you added to default or new changelist or whatever. Accept.
Go to changelist and right-click press revert files to bring back the deleted/missing files.

Detect a workspace switch from p4v

If I have a workspace open in P4V and I switch workspaces is there a way to notify or detect that the switch has happened externally?
The workspace contains an editor and needs to checkout files to modify them. I'm worried that a switch via P4V would leave the editor unaware that the files are now from a different stream.
I would rather have a way to detect this in the editor rather than having to notify from P4V if possible.
Thanks,
Alex
Are you saying your editor checks out the files automatically? That's common, so you're not on your own. What editor is it, if I may ask?
Do you know how your editor talks to Perforce? Am I right thinking that it issues p4.exe (the cmdline tool) commands, e.g. p4 edit? (The other way would be using one of the P4 APIs, e.g. p4java or p4python.) If so, the p4 edit commands already do not respect the P4V workspace setting. The p4.exe cmdline tool will work with the p4 workspace specified in one of six ways. To always use the right client,
have a P4CONFIG file specifying P4CLIENT=[client name] in the root of each of your workspaces
change the p4 integration of your editor in such a way that the p4 edit command will always be run effectively from within the given workspace (in the sense of CWD); you can use the -d switch for this, e.g. when checking out C:\workspaces\wksp1\foo\bar\baz.c you would call p4 -d C:\workspaces\wksp1\foo\bar edit C:\workspaces\wksp1\foo\bar\baz.c.
If the user is using a new workspace, they will also be working with a different set of files, so there's hopefully not much chance for confusion there. (Unless they've made multiple workspaces with the same Root, in which case they're doing their very best to shoot off their own kneecaps.)
If they've switched streams within the current workspace, you can detect this with a command like "p4 info", "p4 client -o", or "p4 stream -o".

Perforce p4ignore with P4v

Does anyone know how to ignore files and/or directories with P4V? I added p4ignore by p4 command line, but P4V does not pickup that.
Thank you in advance for your help.
P4V does work with p4ignore...to a point.
In your workspace view, you will still see the local files that would be "ignored" by the ignore file. The reasoning behind this is multifold, but the main reason is that to show a local view, P4V stats the local directories, and there's no good way other than to constantly check with p4ignore files (and that involves walking the directory tree on up to the workspace root) every time it looks at the tree. Ends up being terribly inefficient.
However, P4V still respects the p4ignore file, and if you attempt to add any file that would be ignored, it properly gives you an error message (with the ability to silently ignore the files as well if you want).

What will this command do: p4 sync //depot/proj1/

I am new to Perforce and want to create a automated tool to get the latest revision by itself. I have a mapping like this:
P4CLIENT: Proj_name
Worspace root direcctory: C:\...\Proj_name
Stream: Build
Now what i desire is it should get latest revision of all files from:
Build\fold1\fold2 to C:\...\Proj_name\fold1\fold2
When I just ran p4 sync command, it copied all files from Build to C:\...\Proj_name.
So please tell how to specify the folder path from where to get the latest revision. Will the command p4 sync //depot/proj1/... work for me and how does it change in my condition ?
You use the View: section of your client spec to describe which parts of the overall repository you wish to work with, and where those files should be placed on your workstation's filesystem.
In your particular case, to specify the folder path, as well as where those files should be placed, you might specify your View: as something like:
View:
//depot/Build/fold1/fold2/... //Proj_name/fold1/fold2/...
You may have considerably more complex view mappings; the view syntax is quite powerful. To learn more about view mappings, type p4 help views.
After you change your View: specification for your client, run:
p4 sync
The sync command will notice that you have changed your view mapping, and it will re-arrange the files in the root of your client on your workstation, so that they are arranged as described by your new view mapping.
If you don't wish to sync your entire client, you can specify a subset of the files which should be sync'd, by naming that subset of files using a file pattern as an argument to the sync command:
p4 sync //depot/Build/fold1/fold2/*.cpp
However, that can be quite confusing, and I recommend that, to start, you avoid using that advanced usage, and stick to performing a p4 sync with no file arguments, at least until you get more comfortable with how p4 sync is used. For one thing, when you are sync'ing different subsets of files with different file arguments, it is quite easy to get your workstation's filesystem into an un-buildable state, by getting half of the files from one changelist and half from another, which will cause you to have code that doesn't compile, etc.
So, for now:
Consider which parts of the repository you wish to work with, and where you want them to go on your workstation's filesystem
Run p4 client and describe the appropriate View: line(s) to specify those files, using the pattern-matching syntax of the View: field
Run p4 sync and Perforce will put those files on your computer as specified.

Track changes missed by not using "check out and open" a file in perforce

I have a few files that have been edited by an external IDE, I forgot to Check Out the files before making the changes however when I look at the files through P4V the files have changed but the indicator for the file itself shows as nothing has changed. How can I ensure my changes are committed without loosing what I have done?
One way I was thinking was to making a copy of the file, revert, check out, copy content or replace file.
That is OK with a few files but what happens when you have done so with hundreds of files?
The "check out" command doesn't modify the local file, so you can just do that on its own without having to make a backup copy of the file first. (What you want to avoid doing is "get latest", although if the local files are writable, Perforce will automatically balk at updating them by default because of this exact situation.)
If you have lots of files that might or might not have been modified in different ways, use Actions > Reconcile Offline Work, or "p4 reconcile" from the command line. This will find the locally modified files and open them for the appropriate action.
The P4V way to do this is called "Reconcile Offline Work": http://www.perforce.com/perforce/doc.current/manuals/p4v/Offline.html
Or, at the command line, you can use 'p4 reconcile': http://www.perforce.com/perforce/doc.current/manuals/cmdref/p4_reconcile.html

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