Parsing VSS History output

FinalBuilder Discussion
1

I have a simple FB build that extracts source code from Visual SourceSafe either by Label or, if no lable specified, Get Latest.   I would like to add some error checking to verify the specified Label exists for the given project.   I can use VSS command line :-

SS History $/project -Oc:\temp

However, the loose formating of the output doesn't make it easy to parse.   I wonder if there are any suggestions for verifiying a label exists for a given project in VSS via command line?

Thanks,

Clive

2

Hi Clive

Parsing VSS output is not easy… part of the problem is the output formatting is not consistent from user to user and machine to machine. In our actions, we set the Output columns width option in the user’s vss.ini file (e.g : Columns (CL) = 120) to a known value to make it easier to parse. If you don’t do that, VSS will just truncate the output. We must have rewritten our VSS parsing code 5 times over in the last 10 years to deal with new gotchas we discover every now and then.

3

Ok, Thanks for that.

Clive