perforceattachmentchangelist

File Attachment inside P4 Changelists

I'm looking for a way to embed file attachments (like screenshots) inside a Perforce changelist. I'm hoping (but not optimistic) that there's a way inside P4 to actually do this, possibly via a plugin.

If not, I'll either have to look into writing a plugin myself (any pointers?), or I have to cook up a wrapper for P4 checkins that also uploads/submits the attachment, then links that attachment to the CL via an identifier inside the CL. (And then I need a tool to correlate and display both).

To add a bit more information: I'm interfacing with the P4 server via a P4API bot that I'm writing. That bots crawls over every checkin and harvests the data it gets to generate reports. I.e. it correlates submissions with the actual feature spec that informed the task, generates a history of progress for that task etc. Within that context, attaching additional meta data to a CL (like a screenshot) is useful because those attachments can then be used in the data mining - they can enhance the reports that I'm generating. I can guard against bad/rampant metadata attachments via a wrapper program that is used to make 95% of all our P4 submissions, anyway (it has its own dialog). But I gotta figure out how to present all the data inside P4 when the P4 CL spec only seems to have text available.

Solution

  • I don't think there is any (easy) way to do what you're requesting. A changelist is "an atomic change transaction". There is very little meta-data with them. The P4 command reference for p4 change lists everything you're allowed to do, and adding an arbitrary attachment isn't there.

    You could always open a feature request in the Perforce forums.

    In Response to Edits

    It looks like this is actually just one instance of a larger problem you're facing: managing meta-data around your depot's projects and its changelists. I would suggest you use this requirement as a driving force behind making some larger process changes at your organization. If you have a lot of data being generated based on automated analysis of your projects, it would be better to create a proper database to organize it all. Your submission wrapper could handle putting screenshots (or any other meta data) in a database and annotating the change list description with tags that indicate where to find attachments in the database.

    A comprehensive database solution would allow you to associate attachments, changelists and other data with each other and other project resources in a more organized fashion than you currently have.

    Original Response

    If you decide to write a plugin to handle just this task without a database, my suggested approach would be the following:

    1. Designate a shared network drive or directory that is accessible to all team members as the "perforce attachment dump". Users should have write access to this area.
    2. Use the changelist description field to create a tag to name a file that should be attached. For example, "Attach: file_name.jpg".
    3. Your users use the plugin to navigate to the file(s) locally and the plugin will copy it to the dump drive and add the tag to the description. The plugin should enforce some naming scheme to make the files easy to find. Perhaps append the changelist number to the file base name? Or create a folder for each changelist?
    4. Use a server side pre-submit trigger and script to scan submitted changelist descriptions for tags and retrieve this file from the attachment dump. It should probably reject changelists with the tag if it can't find the file.
    5. The server side script should move the file to a share drive that is read-only to users. This is so that if you want to look at an attachment for a changelist that is five months old, you can be sure it will still be available.
    6. Give your plugin the ability to open the attachments on the read-only share drive from your developer's local machines, from within P4 and P4V.