There is a difference between a branch and a directory for a file. It just happens that the branch name is the fourth of what you called an entity. I have a few dozen branches, but tens of thousands of files, sorting the way you tell me will simply give me a sorted list of all files and not the branches.

Second of all, although I can tell you that the branch name is the fourth entity, I cannot by simply looking at the name tell you the relationship between branches. For example:

//Efp/Acme/MAIN/Mydir/bar.c
//Efp/Acme/FOO/Mydir/bar.c
//Efp/Acme/BAR/Mydir/bar.c
[download]

In this example, MAIN, FOO, and BAR are branches. However, what are the relationship between these branches? Did both BAR and FOO branch directly off of MAIN, or did BAR branch off of MAIN, and then FOO branched off of BAR? Nothing in the name is telling you this. Maybe MAIN was what branched off of FOO. Simply sorting this information tells me nothing.

The only way I know is by looking at the integration records that tell me for each and every file the fromBranch and the toBranch. So, I might have a few hundred records of files branching from MAIN to FOO. By stripping out the file names (which is what I want to do), and removing duplicates, I end up with a single record telling me that FOO branched off of MAIN.

By taking these from/to branch entries, I can then reconstruct the entire tree structure of the branches. However, getting there means stripping the file information which is why I asked this query.