How to open p4 file by a hyperlink

Question

For example, I have written a document and submited to p4.Then I would like to share it on the company intranet or notify the others by email.

I create a post and refer to the p4 document as a hyperlink in the post. When the user click on it, his local P4 will be launched to sync the document according to his p4 config(would be failed if he is not allow to access the relevant repo), then the document will be opend on his PC.

By imaging this feature, I am just trying to find a solution to share p4 document easily. Since I dont want to upload the documents to the intranet then sync it between p4 manually. Any suggestion is welcome. thanks.

Answer 1

Another simple technique is to set up your intranet web server to serve documents from a frequently-sync'd workspace, as described here: http://www.perforce.com/customers/white_papers/web_content_management_perforce in the section "2. A Simple WCM Approach".

I have used this mechanism, with an Apache web server, and a Perforce client workspace with a cron script sync'ing the workspace every 10 seconds, to share documents via URL in a development environment with dozens of active developers, quite successfully.

Answer 2

You can try using a custom url protocol and handler. This would allow you to write urls like p4v://Some/place/some/where/. The setup will depend on your platform.

• Windows
• Gnome

You could then set the handler to the p4v executable with the -s option. This will open a location, but it won't provide any kind of syncing.

p4v -s "//Some/place/some/where/"

You may also need to coerce the url into a valid perforce path. For example, windows urls will include the text before the colon, causing problems.

p4v -s "p4v://Some/place/some/where/"

So you will probably have to write a wrapper script around the execution of p4v to do some text filtering. This is all kind of a pain, which is why I haven't done it myself.