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Can $B be reset to '1' every day programatically?


Randall Beck (22413) | asked Sep 27 '11, 4:32 p.m.
Hi,

I have a customer who wants to automatically reset the value of $B every day, where $B is the default tag variable, which starts at 1 and gets incremented for every job, and can be used in tags, which are represented by BF_TAG.

For example,

On Monday, BUILD_1, BUILD_2, ...., BUILD_7

On Tuesday, instead of
BUILD_8, BUILD_9, ...., BUILD_15

they would like to see a repeat of Monday's values, e.g.,
On Tuesday, BUILD_1, BUILD_2, ...., BUILD_5

When we run a project, from the UI's "Job Details" tab, there is a way to manually set 'B' to any value the user desires.

Our question: Can this be done programatically?

--Randy

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Benjamin Chodroff (8985231) | answered Sep 27 '11, 5:18 p.m.
The short answer is yes. You could use the Build Forge Java or Perl API to set the value of $B in any project back to a particular value. This could then be automated in (wait for it...) a Build Forge project! Run the schedule every night and you're set. I'm not positive, but you might be able to do this type of update directly from bftool: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/08/0930_toma/index.html

My concern is that you have to make sure that the temporary directories created when a project is run are cleared out. Otherwise, you risk clobbering old results found in BUILD_1, etc. This might be easily done by using a Class that deletes all records every day -- but I'd still be very cautious with this! You might want to manually clear all directories every day.

The other option is to use a date timestamp on every build run. For example, label the build as BUILD_20110927-132534. This would likely satisfy your customer and is much easier to maintain long term. The goal of a build tag is to make it easy to refer back to -- you shouldn't be removing them all the time.

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