Customize Team Build 2010 – Part 13: Get control over the Build Output
In the series the following parts have been published
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Add arguments and variables
Part 3: Use more complex arguments
Part 4: Create your own activity
Part 5: Increase AssemblyVersion
Part 6: Use custom type for an argument
Part 7: How is the custom assembly found
Part 8: Send information to the build log
Part 9: Impersonate activities (run under other credentials)
Part 10: Include Version Number in the Build Number
Part 11: Speed up opening my build process template
Part 12: How to debug my custom activities
Part 13: Get control over the Build Output
Part 14: Execute a PowerShell script
Part 15: Fail a build based on the exit code of a console application
In the part 8, I have explained how you can add informational messages, warnings or errors to the build output. If you want to integrate with other lines of text to the build output, you need to do more. This post will show you how you can add extra steps, additional information and hyperlinks to the build output.
Add an hyperlink to the end of the build output
Lets start with a simple example of how you can adjust the build output. In this case we are going to add at the end of the build output an hyperlink where a user can click on to for example start the deployment to the test environment.
In part 4 you can find information how you can create a custom activity
To add information to the build output, you need the BuildDetail. This value is a variable in your xaml and is thus easily transferable to you custom activity. Besides the BuildDetail the user has also to specify the text and the url that has to be added to the end of the build output.
The following code segment shows you how you can achieve this.
[BuildActivity(HostEnvironmentOption.All)] public sealed class AddHyperlinkToBuildOutput : CodeActivity { [RequiredArgument] public InArgument<IBuildDetail> BuildDetail { get; set; } [RequiredArgument] public InArgument<string> DisplayText { get; set; } [RequiredArgument] public InArgument<string> Url { get; set; } protected override void Execute(CodeActivityContext context) { // Obtain the runtime value of the input arguments IBuildDetail buildDetail = context.GetValue(this.BuildDetail); string displayText = context.GetValue(this.DisplayText); string url = context.GetValue(this.Url); // Add the hyperlink buildDetail.Information.AddExternalLink(displayText, new Uri(url)); buildDetail.Information.Save(); } }
If you add this activity to somewhere in your build process template (within the scope Run on Agent), you will get the following build output
Add an line of text to the build output
The next challenge is to add this kind of output not only to the end of the build output but at the step that is currently executing. To be able to do this, you need the current node in the build output. The following code shows you how you can achieve this.
First you need to get the current activity tracking, which you can get with the following line of code
IActivityTracking currentTracking = context.GetExtension<IBuildLoggingExtension>().GetActivityTracking(context);
Then you can create a new node and set its type to Activity Tracking Node (so copy it from the current node) and do nice things with the node.
IBuildInformationNode childNode = currentTracking.Node.Children.CreateNode(); childNode.Type = currentTracking.Node.Type; childNode.Fields.Add("DisplayText", "This text is displayed.");
You can also add a build step to display progress
IBuildStep buildStep = childNode.Children.AddBuildStep("Custom Build Step", "This is my custom build step"); buildStep.FinishTime = DateTime.Now.AddSeconds(10); buildStep.Status = BuildStepStatus.Succeeded;
Or you can add an hyperlink to the node
childNode.Children.AddExternalLink("My link", new Uri(http://www.ewaldhofman.nl));
When you combine this together you get the following result in the build output
You can download the full solution at BuildProcess.zip. It will include the sources of every part and will continue to evolve.
