Wed
29
Jun 2022

In my old article "Tips for Using Perforce" I promised to dedicate a separate article to what I described there in point 10, so here it is. First, let's talk about the problem. When using a version control system, e.g. Git or Perforce, you surely sometimes inspect the history of a file, to see who changed it, when, and what exactly has been changed throughout its previous versions. GUI clients of such systems offer convenient views to compare text files, but sometimes you may just need to save an old version of the file on your disk - not to update it in your main working copy, but to export it to a separate folder.

In some applications, this is easy. For example, Git Extensions, my favorite GUI client for Git, offers File History window that shows revision history of a selected file. In this window, we can right-click on a specific revision from the list and click "Save as" to export that specific version of the file to a new location on disk.

Unfortunately, in Perforce there is no such command. There is History tab that shows the list of revisions of a selected file. It also offers context menu under right mouse button to do something with a selected revision, but among the commands to diff etc. there is no "Save As", only "Open With". This one allows us to choose some application and open the file with it, which might be useful in case of text files or some other documents (e.g. DOCX, PDF) that we just want to preview using their dedicated app. But what if it is a binary file, having some non-standard extension, that we just want to export to disk?

Here is where the little tool I developed might be useful. SimplySaveAs is a Windows program that you can use to "Open With" a file in Perforce. All it does is show a "Save As" window that lets you choose a place and name where the file should be saved on your disk. This way, the external tool provides the command missing in Perforce visual client (P4V).

The program doesn't need any installation. The repository linked above also contains full source code in C++, but all you need to download is just the file "SimplySaveAs.exe". You can put it in any location on your disk. I like to have a separate directory "C:\PortablePrograms\", where I put all the portable applications that don't need installation, like this one.

First time you want to use it, you need to click on Open With > Choose Application... in Perforce and select "SimplySaveAs.exe" from your disk.

On every next use, Perforce will remember this program and show it available in the context menu, so you can just click Open With > SimplySaveAs.

How does it work? As you may know, opening a file with a program actually needs to save the file on a disk somewhere, likely in a temporary folder, and then launching the program with a path to this file passed as a command-line parameter. This is also what Perforce does when we use "Open With" command. So all my program does is ask the user for a target path and then copy the file from the source, temporary location read from the parameter to the target location selected by the user.

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