Hello,FB provides Team System support. E.g. I can check - in files. I’ve two problems with that. Perhaps somebody could help me:1.) I have a lot of files which I have to check out all at once. When I checkin files only a few files are modified and some files have no changes. I use the TS checkin command of FB. FB raise an exception (similar to message box of TS) when some files have no pending changes. But I want to check-in all files, without exceptions. It’s possible to force checkin of each files without throw an exception? 2.) When I check in files with FB I want to connect a work item.Do somebody know how to solve these problems?
Hi Maik,
Angus is our resident Team Foundation expert, I’ll get him to reply to this message when he gets back in the office on Thursday.
.t8
Hi Malik,
Sorry it’s taken me a while to get back to you.
1) To check in all pending changes, you should be able to just check the “Check in all pending changes” box to check in all changes from a working directory. Even if there are no unchanged files, this option will not fail the action.
If you choose “Check in just the following files and folders”, then the action will fail if no files have changed. This is because of the exit code returned by tf.exe. It would be possible for us to add an option for “Fail if no files changed”, if you feel you need it.
2) Unfortunately, at the moment there is no way to associate work items with changesets at checkin. As far as I know, the tf.exe command line tool does not support this functionality, and that it is how we are automating Team Foundation at the moment. You can still use the Edit Work Item action to change work item properties, just not to link to changesets.
Thank you for reply.to 2.) Are there any other options to checkin changes with workitem?
Hello Angus, I’d like to contribute some remarks concerning checkins:
1. When checkin in a lot of files at once it’s just the option “check in following files and folders” which is compelling, because
then we don’t have to copy and paste FB-checkin commands repeatedly which only holds one file for checkin.
Ok, I realized that this quirk is because of the command line characteristic of tf.exe.
But nevertheless I would appreciate such a list within FB. FB could then iterate it’s entries to execute tf.exe once for every item in the list.
2. It would be nice if I could not only check the “ignore failure” button, but input a concrete substring to search for (e.g.regular expression) when an action fails. In this case the failure should be ignored. We do this already in a seperate action list which we secure with try catch and then do a textsearch to determine if the action has actually faied or not. But this is somewhat cumbersome.
3. Those feature would be nice for checkouts and undos as well.
Thank you.
Posted By Maik Kl on 31 Aug 2006 6:22 AM
Are there any other options to checkin changes with workitem?
Are there any other options to checkin changes with workitem?
Maik,
I think that the only way to do it is to automate the checkin via the .NET Team Foundation Source Control API.
We considered using this API for the Team Foundation actions, but we have generally found (as a rule) that command line tools are more stable, less prone to changes, and less likely to pop up sudden dialogs than APIs are. For this reason we try to avoid .NET and COM APIs when integrating third party tools with FinalBuilder.
There is no reason why you could not write a custom action which references a .NET assembly which then performs the checkin via the .NET API, though.
There is also the possibility that Microsoft may update tf.exe to support referencing work items on the command line (here's hoping.)
Regards,
Angus
Hi Michael,
Thanks for your remarks. Please find some comments below:
Posted By Michael Jenny on 31 Aug 2006 8:57 AM
1. When checkin in a lot of files at once it’s just the option “check in following files and folders” which is compelling, because
then we don’t have to copy and paste FB-checkin commands repeatedly which only holds one file for checkin.
I take it that you can’t use the “check in all files and folders?” option? 1. When checkin in a lot of files at once it’s just the option “check in following files and folders” which is compelling, because
then we don’t have to copy and paste FB-checkin commands repeatedly which only holds one file for checkin.
You can also write multiple lines of file names into the memo box, allowing you to check in multiple files in one checkin operation. You can also wildcards (ie *.txt or subdir*.txt).
But nevertheless I would appreciate such a list within FB. FB could then iterate it’s entries to execute tf.exe once for every item in the list.
If you really need to run tf.exe multiple times (instead of just specifying multiple files, as above) then you can use a List Iterator action as the parent to the tf.exe action. Define a variable, say “listItem” and then use the List Iterator to iterate each element of the list into this variable. Put the Team Foundation Checkin action as the child of the list iterator and set the file name to %listItem%.(Note that I strongly recommend just putting multiple file names into a single checkin operation. This will be much faster.)
2. It would be nice if I could not only check the “ignore failure” button, but input a concrete substring to search for (e.g.regular expression) when an action fails. In this case the failure should be ignored.
A lot of people are doing this for various actions. We’ll consider putting it on the to-do list as a general feature for all actions, rather than just the Team Foundation ones.May I ask what string/condition you’re checking for? We may be able to add support for it to the Team Foundation actions themselves.
Hi everyone,
Stop the presses! I just took a good look at the Team Foundation Checkin action and there are some serious bugs there. In particular, action output is sometimes being conatenated between runs of each action, and specifying individual pathnames to check in does not currently work.
I apologise sincerely for the inconvenience, and especially for not picking up on this sooner.
The bugs have been fixed, and while I was at it I added a “Fail if no changes are made” option so that you can have the action not fail if there are no changed files.
A test build with these fixes is on its way very shortly.
Regards,
Angus
Unfortunately, we’ve had an issue with our build server this afternoon. The test build should be out on Monday.
Test build now available:
https://www.finalbuilder.com/downloads/finalbuilder/420/FB420_283.exe