Perforce Full-text Searching

Question

Quick question as likely I will have more later.

I'm currently investigating document management solutions and was wondering if anyone has been able to set up full-text searching of a Perforce depot? Specifically for Microsoft Office documents (word, excel) however I can see how this would be useful for general text files.

I remember reading something about full-text searching a while ago (on the P4 KB or mailing list) however couldn't find it after a few searches.

If it not possible, a few suggestions on how a solution could be achieved would be helpful, e.g. using Windows Search Services (Sharepoint).

Answer 1

One way to do this is to (a) create a client that maps the interesting contents of the depot, (b) set up automation to sync that client regularly (e.g., once a second) so that it's always up-to-date, (c) set up software like dig, Copernicus, the Google Desktop Search Engine, or Lucene to index the contents of the materials sync'd by the client, and (d) set up a web server of some sort which serves up the results of the indexing engine to searchers.

It requires stitching together several components, but I built a system like this about 10 years ago over a weekend and it held together just fine for 7+ years until I moved on from that organization.

Answer 2

I am not sure about excel / word format but when dealing with text / code files, P4 grep command may be useful for you. Please give it a try:

P4 Grep blog and P4 Grep Manual

Hope you get a lead from there.