Getting LabVIEW-Perforce integration to work with a complex Perforce Workspace

[Bernardtb]

Hi

I am having trouble getting my Perforce system to work with LabVIEW 8.6 Professional. Briefly, Perforce has a special system for splitting a workspace over two logical drives. In my case these are a Novell shared drive which holds versions which I have "published" as a code branch for colleagues, and my local drive which holds the development line. To do this requires Perforce workspace settings of:

Workspace-> VMware-NI

root -> null

AltRoots ->

c:/

r:/

View->

"//depot/LabVIEW/BJTB Library/LV851/release/..." "//VMWare-NI/r:/NI/LabVIEW851/user.lib/B.J. Treves Brown/..."
"//depot/LabVIEW/BJTB Library/LV860/release/..." "//VMWare-NI/r:/NI/LabVIEW860/user.lib/B.J. Treves Brown/..."
"//depot/LabVIEW/BJTB Library/main/..." //VMWare-NI/c:/Users/mcnssbt/Documents/LabVIEW/Lib-Devel/...

<etc>

This works correctly with the Perforce tools, but not from the LabVIEW project using either Perforce Command Line or Perforce SCM.

If I cut the workspace down to 

root -> c:/

AltRoots->

View ->  

"//depot/LabVIEW/BJTB Library/main/..." //VMWare-NI/c:/Users/mcnssbt/Documents/LabVIEW/Lib-Devel/...

Then LabVIEW integration works correctly, identifying which files are checked out, etc.

Any ideas (apart from maintaining two workspace definitions)?

Thanks

Bernard Treves Brown

[Andrew McL]

Hi Bernard,

Thank you for contacting National Instruments. I have brought this issue up with the US as I don't know a massive amount about the Perforce program. They have a couple of questions which may help us solve this problem:

1) What version of Perforce are you using?

2) What does "not work" mean?

3) What happens when they use this split workspace?

If you can be as detailed as possible, I will be able to relate this information to the US and hopefully we should get a resolution.

Many thanks,

[Bernardtb]

Andrew,

1) What version of Perforce are you using?

Perforce Server: 2007.3 [ Rev. P4D/FREEBSD60X86/2007.3/152469 (2008/04/24) ]

P4V Client:  Perforce Visual Client/NTX86/2008.2/188141    on VistaSP1

2) What does "not work" mean?

I am defining "work" to mean that right-click menus in LV Project Explorer contain Check-In/Check-Out options for files in the workspace and, in its main display, shows the little squares with markers indicating whether or not a file is checked out.

I assume "not work" is due to some failure in Project Explorer/Perforce integration.

3) What happens when they use this split workspace?

With the split workspace Project Explorer does not "work" - i.e. there is some problem with its integration with Perforce. With the workspace on a single disk it "works". Perforce's own tool, P4V, works as expected in both cases, but that is much less convenient as it does not understand VI hierarchies so each calling VI must be identified and checked out individually. - Project Explorer can identify which VIs will be recompiled as a result of a change and can check them out semi-automatically.

I hope this answers your questions. I can send the full workspace definitions if required, but the shortened ones in my original post should be enough to reproduce the problem.

Thanks
Bernard

[Andrew McL]

Hi Bernard

I received information from R&D regarding this issue, and it seems like the problem is not with the integration between Perforce and LabVIEW, but rather the way in which the   utilization of the "AltRoots" feature. This feature is intended to use the same Perforce client specifications on multiple platforms with different directory naming conventions. It was not meant to be used with two drives on the same platform, which can lead to the following issues. Please see the link below for a definition of the AltRoots command.

http://www.perforce.com/perforce/doc.082/manuals/cmdref/client.html

I hope this helps,

Many thanks