Helix Core — version control from Perforce — tracks, manages, and secures changes to all your digital assets, including large binary files. Scale your infrastructure, support your remote teams, and move faster.
Full Video Transcript
P4V is the visual client for Perforce Helix Core. It runs on Linux, PC and Macintosh Computers. It’s an easy way to access the server for many functions, instead of using the P4 command-line client.
We’ll be exploring the basic operations in P4V on Windows 10, but the interface looks and acts the same across the supported platforms.
The most common operations performed using P4V are getting the latest versions of files into your workspace from the server, performing edits, and submitting the revised files back into the server depot.
In P4V, you can easily check a file’s status. Here on the EWidget file, we see a yellow triangle that indicates we do not have the latest version. The fraction lets us know that we have version 1, and that version 2 is the most recent version in the depot.
We right-click the file and select “Get Latest Revision.” Now we have the latest version from the depot in the workspace on our computer. Most times, you would select a whole folder or project to get all the latest versions at once.
Here on the ENut file, we can see from the blue check that at least one other person has the ENut file checked out. When we hover over the file, we can see which developer is currently working on it.
Even though Joe Coder has it checked out, we can check out ENut, too, along with EWidget for edit. If you right-click a file, you can select check-out. You also have the option to check-out and open a file in the default editor in one operation. Another quick method is to drag and drop them onto the pending changelist pane, which we will do here.
The red check marks, which just appeared, indicate you have the files open for edit. Those files now appear with blue checks on everyone else’s workstations letting them know they are checked out by another user – in this case – you.
Now we are ready to get to work. Double-clicking on a file opens it in the editor. You can set the default editor for any file type in the preferences menu of P4V.
We change this constant, and save it.
Now let’s open EWidget, add a comment, and save it as well.
We are now ready to submit these files into the depot. But let’s say we decide not to include the changes to the EWidget file. By electing “Revert” from the menu, and confirming the selection, you can discard the changes. EWidget is no longer checked out for edit.
Now we will submit the ENut file to the depot by selecting Submit and writing a changelist description. Submissions to the depot do not need to be first out/first in. If you want to leave this transaction open, you can select “Save” to keep these items open for edit. You can continue checking out new files, making modifications, and submitting them before finally submitting this pending changelist. For now, we just want to get this new version of ENut into the depot, so we click “Submit.”
Now your work is in the depot on the server for the team to view and edit. The submitted changelist info has been updated to reflect this entry.
Partial check-ins are not allowed by the system. If there was a conflict with this file, the submit would not complete. Instead, P4V would walk you through the process of resolving the conflicts.