P4Web User Guide - Working with Labels

P4Web Release 2012.1 User Guide
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Working with Labels

A label enables you to mark a set of file revisions for later access. For example, release engineers can label the file revisions that comprise a particular release of their program. The label can be assigned a meaningful name, like release2.0.1. The label can be used for syncing, branching, or comparing files.

To create a label, you must:

Create the label spec, which defines the name of the label and the label view. The label view limits the files that can be tagged with the label.
Perform an Add/Replace files... to apply the label to specified file revisions.

After you have created the label spec and tagged the revisions using Add/Replace files, you can use that label to access those files at a later date. See Creating and Editing Labels for additional information.

Accessing labels

To list labels, click the Labels tab. To display only the labels that contain tagged files in your current path, select the Labels with files in current path checkbox and click Filter.

Label Spec Detail

Clicking on a label name displays detailed information, including the label spec's fields. For information about these fields, see Creating and Editing Labels.

To list the files tagged by the current label, including each file's path in the depot, the filetype, and the revision number of the file, choose View files in label from the Action menu

From this page, you can use also use the Action menu to:

Edit the label spec.
Delete the label spec.
Add or Replace files in a label.
Sync the workspace to the files tagged with this label.
Create a new label, using this label as a template.

For information on creating a label without using a template, see Creating and Editing Label Specs.

Why not use changelist numbers?

Changelist numbers are an alternative to labels, if you need to refer to a group of files. Labels share certain important characteristics with changelist numbers, as both refer to particular file sets, and both refer to all the files in the set. But labels have some important advantages over changelist numbers:

The file revisions tagged by a particular label can come from different changelists.
A changelist number refers to the contents of all the files in the depot at the time the changelist was submitted, but a label can refer to an arbitrary set of files and revisions.
The files and revisions tagged by a label can be changed at any point in the label�s existence.
Changelists are always referred to by Perforce-assigned numbers, but labels are named by the user.