Perforce Changelist Summary

Question

Does anyone know how to get perforce to generate a table of the details and descriptions of a file's history?

Either GUI or command line solutions are OK. On the P4V GUI windows client, when you right-click on a file in the work space tree view, and select "File History", you can see a list of every revision, with Description as the last column in this list. I would love to just print this list out in a printer friendly format (because if there is a long description it never fits on the screen).

Basically I need a nice neat list of every change to a file, with date, and a description of the change. I have not found a way for perforce to generate this printable list, other than in the "File History", but this is not printable besides using the snipping tool or print screen, which i do not want to use.

The best case scenario would be a list with the date and description, and also a summary of the diff-against analysis, to show exactly what was changed in each revision for a particular file.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You could could try using P4Report* to create a report that directly queries this information from the Perforce. It does this by providing an ODBC data source which integrates into a number of reporting programs, e.g. Crystal Reports, Microsoft Excel etc.

I have not used it myself before, however given the opportunity I would do so over writing a custom script.

There is some documentation in the Perforce manual on getting it set up and there is plenty of tutorials/information on consuming data sources in Microsoft Excel.

From your other questions/answers, I can see that you know how use an ODBC data source so P4Reports should provide you what you need. As for the actual p4 commands you need, see Karl Bielefeldt's answer.

_{* It is about half-way down the page amongst the other Tools & Utilities}

Answer 2

p4 changes -l <filename> will give you this info on the CLI. I believe the only way to get the individual diff-against info would be to write a script that runs p4 describe on every relevant changelist.