This page is a brief user manual for P4DB.
The reader is assumed to have working knowledge of Perforce P4 and web browsers.
P4DB is a http depot browser for Perforce p4. The depot browser is implemented as a set of CGIs that present information about the status of the p4 depot using HTML.
The purpose of P4DB is to provide a convenient way to browse the p4
depot for p4 administrators, project managers, developers, testers etc.
that need information about changes in the depot.
Some typical uses for P4DB are:
P4DB can only present information in the depot and have no access to the files in the users file space.
P4DB use the standard p4 commands to retrieve information from the depot. P4DB does not add any other information but will often combine output from more than one command to get the information.
P4DB produces almost only plain html. No javascript, very little CSS (Cascades Style Sheets), one gif. P4DB use one http cookie to store user preferences.
P4DB is developed using Netscape Communicator 4.7 browser and
Apache http server. Both browser and server run on a Linux system.
I perform some basic testing with Explorer but that's it.
There are no supported platforms basically because there is no support. P4DB is open source software and I expect the brave p4 administrator that installs P4DB to provide support for end users. I will of course answer questions if I can and is more than willing to listen to suggestions or constructive criticism but please forward all this through your administrator.
Here is examples on how to use P4DB to answer some questions about files in the depot. The list is by no means complete but should give some idea of what P4DB can be used for.
Sure! You are looking at it, only it's not finished yet. This help page can be reached in two ways:
Easy! But there are several ways:
And there are more ways. If you browse around in P4DB you will see that for virtually all items, like labels or branches, that refer to the depot you can select "View changes".
You administrator may create one or mote of shortcut files where each file contains a set of shortcuts that are presented as links on the main page. See the "Set Preferences" page to select a shortcut file, if there are any shortcut files defined.
There are many ways here too.
In general, in all pages that show a file name a click on the file
name will show the file log.
To the left in the header the P4DB version information and the current
change level in the depot.
At the top center of each page is a title that describes the content
of the page.
To the top left of the page there is a link to the paragraph in this
document that describes the current page.
Below the current level and page title there is a field that contains
some more information about the page and sometimes links that links to
information related to the page or change the information displayed on
the page.
Below the help link there is a link to the main page, except on the
main page where this place is empty.
To the bottom left the current p4 port and host is displayed.
To the right there is one or more mail-to-links to the administrator(s)
and to the far right is a link to the page top.
This is the start page for P4DB. The start page contains four sections:
A set of links to pages that lets you browse the depot, view pending changes,
view branches or labels etc.
For detailed information click on the link and select help in the page
header.
This section will only exist if the P4DB administrator have created shortcut
file and you have selected one in "Set Preferences".
The section contains a set of shortcut links to various pages.
This section contains a set of advanced searches with text fields for user input.
View changes for the file spec.
The file spec may contain wildcards (p4 style).
Two or more file specifications may be specified if they are separated
by a "+"-sign.
View all files in the depot matching a file specification. The file specification will typically contain wildcards (p4 style).
View a change specified by change number.
This section contains three links.
P4DB allows the user to set some preferences. Some of the choices are defined in the configuration file by the P4DB administrator.
The preferences are:
| P4 Depot | Select depot from a set of depots defined in the configuration file by the P4DB administrator. A typical installation will probably only have one single depot to choose. |
|---|---|
| Shortcut file to use | The P4DB administrator can define a set of shortcut files that provides handy shortcuts for the user. |
| Shortcuts on top of main page | If a shortcut file is selected the shortcuts can be displayed on top of page or not. |
| Ignore case (like NT) | Set to "yes" if you work in a Windows environment. |
| Max changes to show | When changes are listed it is convenient to limit the number of changes per page or the page might take very long to load. I have found 100 to be a reasonable number in a fast LAN and probably about 20 or so if you work over modem. |
| Default tab stop | Default tab stop for your source code. If not set correctly the indentation will look funny when you view your source code. |
| View files with colors | The file viewer in P4DB can colorize HTML, perl and C code. Set this to Yes to turn this function on. Set to off (No) if you want to use a color scheme with dark background. |
| Underline links | Some people want their links underlined some don't. |
| Color scheme | Select a color scheme to use. There are a few predefined to choose from. |
| Enable experimental java depot tree browser | Once I wrote this small java applet to get a GUI to go with P4DB. Does not work in all installations but neat to have when it does. |
| Print log information | Print a log at the bottom of each page. Really only useful for debugging. |
Used to browse the file tree in the depot.
The Depot Tree Browser presents data in three sections.
In the top of the page there is a link to view changes below current directory and a link to toggle show/hide deleted files.
Lists all users and user groups.
For each user the p4-user-name. name as specified in user description, email address and last access time is displayed. If the user has not been accessed for more than 10 weeks a message about this is printed.
Click on p4 user name to get details about user.
Click on e-mail address to send email to user.
If any groups are defined they are listed below the users. Click on group name to see details about group.
This page lists changes with different selection criteria.
The selection criteria is displayed in the header.
Since the list may be very long it is limited to a specific number
of changes (see Set Preferences). If there
are more changes there is a "More..." link at the bottom of the page.
At the top of the page is a link that automatically lists the change descriptions for change the numbers referred to in the change description (try it and you will understand what I mean).
Search changes for text pattern in description.
The pattern fields contains a pattern that is searched for in the change descriptions.
The search is not case sensitive and the following wildcard characters are accepted:
Shows some statistics from the depot or part of the depot.
I can't honestly say what all this is good for other than satisfying your curiosity.
This is the great submit race. The Submit Race reads the last
499 submits and ranks the users after the number of submits.
There is also some assessment of the "speed" based on the average position
of the users submits in the list.
The last user among the 499 changes gets her submit number in red.
This means that this number will be decremented the next time somebody submits
a change.
The user that made the most recent submit gets a green background to
her submit number.
To be able to enjoy the race there is a link that replays the last 30 submits.
Please don't take the Submit Race to seriously.....