Perforce Plugin Integration, Misc.

[bercikr]

Hi,

    My team has been having trouble with the perforce integration strategy used by SlickEdit. We currently use the P4WSAD plugin to manage our perforce interaction in Eclipse and it works pretty well for any file types that are not associated with Slickedit. The main feature they like about the plugin is the ability to automatically check-out a file when they begin editing it rather than manually checking out each file or folder before they work on it. I was able to demonstrate how to setup SlickEdit's perforce integration(which is a little clunky in comparison) so that they could check out files automatically as well. However, the only remaining issue is that since all the commands are executed via the command line, the label decorations are not updated until they perform a Team==>Refresh on the file or parent folder. It seems to me that SlickEdit must not be notifying eclipse properly that it is editing a file or else I think the P4WSAD plugin would do its magic. Any input on what's going on here and/or ideas for a solution to this problem?

Thanks,
Rob

[Ryan]

Hey Rob,

Our Version Control stuff isn't supported in the plug-in...we leave any Build/Project Management/Version Control functionality to Eclipse because we try not to duplicate their functionality.  Now, the commands and functionality is there...as it appears you have discovered .  But we do not intend for it to be used...that's why we remove the options from all of the menus.

To clarify, are you having trouble with SlickEdit's Perforce Integration (which is kind of a non-issue because you shouldn't be leveraging that anyway ) or are you having trouble using your P4WSAD plug-in in conjuction with SlickEdit Core?  I would want to know exactly what isn't happening when you are using the two plug-ins in unison that seems to work when you do not have Core installed.

One note...if you are going to use the label decorations from a version control system, I suggest turning off the SlickEdit decorator because sometimes those icons will overlay, and undoubtedly your version control icons are what you want to see.  You can find this option at Window > Preferences > Appearance > Label Decorations.

Keep me posted.

- Ryan

[bercikr]

Hi Ryan,

Well, it looks like you get some free QA work because I found and tested your perforce integration in SlickEdit(and it looks like its working). Here's the issue we're having stated a little more clearly(I hope). I'll use my own project as an example.

Also, for the sake of this discussion forget everything I said about using SlickEdit's perforce integration, I've turned it off.

In my project, I have a number of files all of which are checked into perforce. Most of these files are SlickEdit modules(*.e) and so have a slickedit association. Some other files(like my various ant scripts) I have chosen not to associate with SlickEdit and I use the internal Eclipse Editors. When I begin editing a non-slickedit file(build.xml) my file is automatically checked out from Perforce(and changed from read-only to read-write in the process), in addition my Label decorations get updated and now show that my file was opened for edit. (We already turned off the Slickedit Label decorator, FYI).

Now, when it comes time to edit a SlickEdit file(mymodule.e), I go begin editing the file and get this pop-up(minus arrows of course)



So, in order to edit the file I go ahead and Click Change RW... and then I see this next window(arrow will show you where the SE perforce integration can be found, but again, I'm not using it for this example...)



So I Click OK ... not Version Control Setup

Then I can continue on and edit my file. But when I go and try and check this file back into Perforce it will inform me that this file was never checked out and I have to jump through a hoop to get it back into Perforce. Overall, a very annoying user experience. The only way to avoid this is to remember to do a Team==>Open For Edit on the file or parent folder before editing. So for some reason, SlickEdit is doing things differently than the other Internal Editors and P4WSAD is not aware of the editing that is occurring.

Does this make the issue a little clearer?

Thanks,
Rob

[Ryan]

Were there pictures that got removed somehow from this post?  I'm pretty sure I know the first dialog you are talking about, but the latter one I would like to see...

- Ryan

[bercikr]

Yeah, My images got clobbered for some reason. I edited the post and i think its working now.

[Ryan]

Alright...so once I got up to speed with Perforce and this P4WSAD plug-in, I could reproduce the issue you are seeing.  I'm glad that the Open For Edit functionality is there as a workaround, but I would really like to get this fixed.  However, P4WSAD is closed source and I can't snoop around for what I'm looking for .  I've sent an email to them describing the issue, and hopefully they should get me an adequate answer from one of their devs, or put me in direct contact with one of them.

Basically what I told them is that our editor is not created in Eclipse in the traditional way of extending the base Eclipse editor.  There must be some event that P4WSAD is listening for that isn't firing when a file is opened with our editor, and thus it's not responding and doing the normal "auto-checkout/auto-writable" thing.  Hopefully they can get me the information I need, and I can get this fixed.  I'll keep you posted...

- Ryan

[bercikr]

Thanks for looking into this for us. Unfortunately, the p4v stuff doesn't seem to be as error free as I initially thought. Whenever it loses the connection to perforce you get an endless loop of modal windows that read "You must first open a project(Tools...Version Control...Setup)" and you need to do a CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+F2 and then click ok to bypass the error. I've stopped using the SE perforce stuff and just went back to manually checking out files before i edit them. Let me know what you find out on this one.

Thanks,
Rob

[Ryan]

Well good news and bad news.  The good news is the Support dept. at Perforce seems to be pretty punctual...the bad news was I didn't get the answer I wanted (after a couple back and forth emails):

There is an existing enhancement request to add this functionality, that is for 'open for edit automatically' to work with external editors (other than the default Eclipse editor). I have added your contact information to the request.
If this gets implemented in a future release, you will get an email notification.

So it seems as though they are only paying attention to default Eclipse editors...there might indeed be nothing I can do about this...yet... .  I'm throwing them one more email just to make 100% sure of what they are telling me.

- Ryan

[Ryan]

After some back and forth between myself and Perforce, and some help from Rob, we have fixed this issue.  It should now work as expected.  This will be fixed in our 3.4 release.

This fix should also allow for any other plug-ins which attempt to validate an edit on a read only file to do their thing.

- Ryan