FB6 - Checking for Source Code Changes

FinalBuilder Feature Requests
1

Does FB6 have the ability to compare source code (in Visual SourceSafe, for us) to see if there have been any changes? In our development environment, we have several shared directories of source code. I would like to be able to check for changes and build all applications that depend on these directories. Will FB6 address this in any way?

I thought that I read something about FB6 addressing "continuous integration" here in the forums but the annoucement of FB6 doesn't mention it. In addition, I don't see anything different in FB6 under the SourceSafe actions.

I can imagine solving this problem by getting all files from the VSS repository and doing a file compare (using Beyond Compare, for example) between two versions and then having some extensive if..then..else type logic to identify the applications that need to be rebuilt. There's got to be an easier and faster way.

 

Daniel Comeau

2

Hi Daniel,

Continuous integration is a FinalBuilder Server 6 feature, so if you're using Server then you can do this.

FinalBuilder (since version 4, actually) has a File Dependency action which can be used to create dependencies on files or groups of files changing. So if you do a Get with the "set file time" option set to "checkin", you can use File Dependency to compare sources with built executables and determine whether or not to run a build.

Here's an (old, pre FB 4 final release) blog post I wrote about how to do this:

https://www.finalbuilder.com/resources/blogs/file-dependencies

(The process hasn't changed since FB 4, though.)

- Angus