Helix Core — version control from Perforce — tracks, manages, and secures changes to all your digital assets, including large binary files. Scale your infrastructure, support your remote teams, and move faster.

 

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Full Video Transcript

Helix stores your company’s versioned files and allows users to access and share those files. A workspace is the location on your computer where you work on files that are managed by the Helix server. In this video, we’ll explain workspace concepts and set one up using P4V, a client application that communicates with the server.

The server manages depots, which are shared file repositories. Depots contain every revision of every versioned file. A workspace defines the path of the depot to files required for your projects. This workspace “view” selects the files to be copied from the depot to your computer.

After you get the latest versions of files to your computer, you check them out to edit them. When you are finished editing, you submit them back to the depot. Files you have changed appear in the depot as new versions and are available to other users.

Here we are in P4V. All versioned files in the depot are located here in this tab. Your workspace, in this tab, shows the subset of depot files that are copied locally to your computer so that you may work on them.

All project files can be stored together in a directory in the depot, where they are available for your team members to access. However, you can choose to keep only those files you work on in your local workspace.

Note that only one version of each file is kept in your workspace-you can choose whether to work on the latest version or an earlier version. Any previous version of a file is available from the depot because the depot stores the entire history of your files.

To create a new workspace, go to Connection>New Workspace… The name field gets autopopulated, but re-name it to whatever makes sense for you-whether it be project- or name-based.

Workspace root is the location on your computer where the files in your workspace are kept. Select a location that is easy for you to remember. As a best practice, keep your workspaces in a folder. You can define a new folder here and Perforce will create it for you.

In the Workspace Mappings field, you select the directories you want copied from the depot to your workspace. The directories with a check-mark are directories that are automatically chosen (this is usually defined by your admin). It’s best to cherry-pick only the directories that you want to modify, to be copied to your computer. Click this icon to add or right-click to find your options.

Alternatively, you can use the text view. The depot location of the file you want is on the left. On the right, is the path of your workspace. This path starts with your workspace location and then repeats the same depot path for the file or directory.

When you check the “Automatically get all revisions”, then, hit OK, and then, “Update”, the latest versions of the selected files will be added to your computer. Otherwise, the workspace will populate once you manually sync, or Get Latest Revision of the mapped files.

After your workspace is created, to add more files from the depot to your workspace, select the desired file or folder, and right-click to choose “Map to workspace view”. It will be added to your workspace mappings and you can Get the Latest Revision.

If you are no longer working on a project, you can remove those files or folders from your workspace. Under Connection, choose “Edit Current Workspace…” Delete the paths, hit OK, and you will be prompted to Update. This action removes the files from your computer, but they will remain in the depot.

You are not limited to one workspace. You can have a workspace setup for each of your projects or have one overall workspace where you sync files as needed.

You can create an alias or shortcut of your workspace directory and place it on your desktop for quick access. Place new files and folders you want to version into your workspace folder, so they can then be added to the depot from within P4V.

Thanks for watching.

Course - Getting Started with Helix VCS - Users