Perforce and Labview, A new Frontier

[Timmar]

Just thought I should add my trials an tribulations to future users of perforce and labview.

First i found Visual Guide to source control to be a great resource to explain source control to my colleges.

2nd:

Requirements Analysis.

I have multiple users on multiple branches in multiple sites.

This functionality Ruled out SVN as a choice

I am a former user of clearcase, which has spoiled me for features, but not price nor speed.

Perforce, on paper a good balance between cost and features. If i was working in a text based language I would be over the moon.

So where to Start:

John's essential Guide

Without this I would have been lost in the weeds for days, Give it a read, Special Thanks to John at Giawerx.

Here is the extra information:

Install the P4 SCC IDE plugin to enable Labview to see Perforce through the advanced interface (The command line implementation is poor). John has done this but doesn't explicitly say so in his guide.

When creating a new, empty Depot, you will need to check the view path, the default settings don't work.

Drive Substitution

My last unresolved challenge (Jump in here if anyone can help):

To combat Laview's(and other compilers) incessant need to crosslink all files with absolute paths, I have got into the practice of substituting the project root to another drive (A: and B: tend to be unused now days).

This works seamlessly with clearcase. I haven't yet figured out how to do it with perforce.

Perforce tech help recommend adding your substituted drive path to "alt root" but I have been unsuccessful in applying it to my setup.

Stay tuned for a solution, or better still provide one, I will be much appreciative.

Tim L.

[silmaril]

We are using Perforce with LabVIEW (and other languages) for almost seven years now. It turned out to be a very reliable SCC solution.

There is one more thing you should consider at an early stage: Which file types are treated as binary files and which as text files? And which files should be locked automatically when they are checked out?

I recommend taking the time to read about the Perforce Typemap and then setting up your own typemap that will apply to any new files on the server.

Here are the lines dealing with typical LabVIEW file types from our server (please ignore syntax highlighting):

	binary+l //....vi	binary+l //....vit	binary+l //....ctl	binary+l //....ctt	text+l //....lvproj	text+l //....lvlib	text+l //....lvclass	text+l //....xctl	text+l //....xnode

Yes we are quite conservative when it comes to parallel editing of XML files, because merging them usually is a pain in the butt. So we lock them automatically on checkout.