Customizing the output of Perforce RCS keyword expansion

Question

I'd like to filter files using RCS keyword expansion so that instances of $Change$ are translated to 1745 rather than the default behaviour of $Change: 1745 $. I realize that this would prevent future expansions, but that's acceptable for the purposes.

Other methods of inserting the changelist number into a file are also welcome. This is the only method I've seen with Perforce that works during submission -- it's just that I'd like to clean it up so that it can be cleanly inserted into version numbers. Could this also be accomplished with triggers?

Answer 1

What you are asking for cannot be done with triggers. The only triggers that are active during submit are change-submit, change-content and change-commit. You can only retrieve the file-content for the latter two, but with the change-content trigger, the changelist number is not yet fix, and with the change-commit trigger, the file-content is already committed and can't be changed. What's worse, though, is that you wouldn't have a way to submit a changed file-content back to the server from within your trigger.

The RCS keyword expansion works because it is done by the server itself and because Perforce does a refresh-after-submit, i.e. the client refreshes all files of a submitted change from the Perforce server, thereby getting the content with expanded RCS keywords.