Swarm 2014.3: User Guide

Many developers like to type the least amount of information to locate the data they're looking for. Swarm tries to assist by handling URLs intelligently. If you visit a URL like:

http://myswarm/identifier

Swarm attempts to locate identifier as a review, changelist, depot path, project, job, user, depot name, and GitFusion SHA1 (or fragment). If you visit the URL http://myswarm/123, Swarm redirects to http://myswarm/changes/123, provided that changelist 123 exists. If you visit the URL http://myswarm/bob, Swarm tries each of the following URLs and redirects to the first match:

http://myswarm/changes/bob
http://myswarm/files/bob
http://myswarm/projects/bob
http://myswarm/jobs/bob
http://myswarm/users/bob

If you enter an identifier that does not exist for any type of resource, Swarm displays a Page Not Found error.

Whenever you write a changelist description, job description, comment, or review, use an @mention to refer to projects, changelists, jobs, and users. Swarm automatically creates a link for each @mention, so it's easy to navigate to the specified resource. For example, when you include @job12345 in a comment, Swarm turns that text into a link that, when clicked, displays the “Jobs” page for job12345.

When you start a code review, any users included as @mentions in the changelist description automatically become reviewers for that code review. During a code review, including a user @mention in a comment also causes the mentioned user to receive notifications of code review events, even if they are not a member of your project or following you or your project. Including an asterisk (*) before the userid in an @mention, for example @*userid, that user becomes a required reviewer. See “Required reviewers” for details.

Swarm ships with a JIRA module that can:

By default, the JIRA module is disabled. To enable JIRA integration, see “Enabling the JIRA module”.

Each event in an activity stream includes an avatar, an image that represents the user responsible for the event. Avatars help to visually tie together various events and personalize the history presented in the stream.

Based on the email address entered in a user's Perforce account, Swarm attempts to fetch an avatar from gravatar.com. Otherwise, Swarm selects from its collection of default avatars and color palettes to provide pleasing variations.

Hover your mouse over an avatar to display a tooltip with the user's full name.

Whenever you see a Follow button, for example when you are viewing a project page or user profile, clicking the button causes Swarm to send you notifications whenever there is activity generated by the current resource.

This is useful if, in the case of a project, you are not a project member but want to know what's happening in the project. Or, in the case of a user, you want to see what activity that user generates.

To stop receiving notifications, visit the project page or user profile and click the Unfollow button.

Swarm typically displays the time of an event, such as when a file was created, as about X units ago. Hover your mouse pointer over a time display to see a tooltip displaying the exact date and time of the event.

Swarm provides the following keyboard shortcuts:

You can discover the version of Swarm you are using:

If Swarm encounters an error during processing, such as when a Quick URL is used that points to a non-existent resource, Swarm presents a custom error page featuring its mascot, Bizzy Heisenbug. Bizzy's friends swarm your mouse pointer while you are moving it.

Swarm provides a short link feature that creates shorter URLs than normal to make sharing specific views within Swarm easier. It is also possible to register or configure an alternate, shorter hostname to have even shorter URLs. See “Short links” for details.

Conceptually, this is identical to http://tinyurl.com/, or Twitter's http://t.co/, but is restricted to Swarm URLs on a hostname you control.

Swarm displays a bookmark button when viewing files or folders in the depot.

Click the button to display a popup containing the short link. Press CTRL+C (on Windows and Linux), or Command+C (on Mac OSX), to copy the short link. You can then paste the short link anywhere you'd like to share the current file or folder view in Swarm.

Swarm is intended to be used from any modern browser, including most mobile device browsers. For our initial release, mobile browser testing has been quite limited. We anticipate that you may encounter various issues, but we certainly look forward to hearing about your mobile device experiences using Swarm.