About Our Crucible-Perforce Bridge
This is the fifth in a series of posts on our peer code review process at Loose Cannon. In the third, I briefly mentioned a tool I created to bridge the gap between Perforce pending changelists and Crucible. Two great tastes that taste great together. A key part of our review process. In this post, I’ll talk about how it works in excruciating detail!
Caution: this might be the most boring post ever.
About The Tool
The “tool” is actually a command crucreate that is part of a Perforce-based tool I wrote called P4X for adding small utility functions. P4X is built on top of p4.net, which is itself built on top of a native lower layer. Unfortunately, p4.net is rather weak on supporting specific P4 “forms”, preferring only to give general form access. I assume this is to prevent issues with changes to forms across P4 versions. So of course I had to make yet a third layer that wraps up p4.net to build real classes instead of generic forms and arrays, like ChangelistSpec and FileSpec.
P4X comes in two flavors: p4x.exe, the command line tool (uses stdin/out/err), and p4xwin.exe, the gui tool (uses Windows dialogs). The command line tool is meant to be used from scripts and console apps including a command shell. It behaves similarly to p4.exe, mimicking P4’s simple command line format for consistency (prefix params for user/pass etc., command name + command args, ‘help’ for each, etc.).
The gui tool is meant to be hooked into P4V/P4Win, taking advantage of context-sensitive features, or as a simple external tool from editors and so on. For example, it includes a “blame” feature that receives a filename and line number from the editor, which in turn opens up FishEye to the given file and line (FishEye does a much better job than P4 annotate or P4Web IMO).
Installing P4X
Installing support for P4X commands is easy. For P4Win, you double-click a .reg file we have checked into our depot. And for P4V, you import custom tools from a .xml file (also in the depot). This adds in a variety of commands, including the one we care about:
Command = p4xwin.exe
Arguments = –c $c –p $p –u $u crucreate %c
AddToContext = true
This will install a “Create Crucible Review from Changelist…” command to the Tools menu, but it will only be enabled if the user currently has a changelist focused. And by using AddToContext = true, we can right-click on any changelist and the command will show up as enabled. Running it passes in the changelist number in place of %c (or 0 if default). Note that it also passes in the current user/password/port settings. The crucreate command can’t ever assume a global set of connection settings. If these aren’t passed in, then P4X just inherits whatever the environment’s settings are.
It’s really convenient to be able to just right-click a pending changelist and get a review. My personal workflow goes like this for any given change:
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