One of the area's that I've found very refreshing with Continua is the variables section. Continua allows you to inject variables into the FinalBuilder project, which is fantastic. I'm now faced with a "copy and paste nightmare" to get everything out of FB project variables and put them into Continua. Essentially I've been very consistent with my project variable names in FB project, via copy and paste. This however isn't as easy to complete within Continua with out mucking around.
Feature Request for variables
Ability to search for variables through the whole site. In fact, search seems to be missing completely in Continua.
When ImportFBS.exe processes all the Final Builder Server settings, it should automatically create matching project variables as Continua variables and setup the Final Builder Action/stage injecting those variables into Final Builder.
Modify the view /administration/variables to include a tab with a list of all the variables used within projects (Hack search).
Create a button/feature that allows you to "clone/duplicate" variables from another project.
Allow variables to change scope from Configuration to Project and vice versa.
If a Stage includes a FinalBuilder Project, the user should be prompted to include Continua Variables for the Final Builder Project variables. This removes the double typing of variables between the products. As the Final Builder projects should be included in a Repo, based on the documentation, I'm not sure what the workflow should be for this. I suspect that some flag must be set to keep the variables in sync and if there is a miss-match, an event log is triggered to remind the users to modify continua variable values accordingly.
1) Search is a feature on our todo list for a future release. We decided against adding any sort of hack searching until we have time to do it properly.
2) The import should create variables in Continua CI already, what it doesn't do is add them to the placeholder FinalBuilder action. I just asked Dave to look at that and see if it can be done.
3) On the todo list, but again it really needs to leverage a search architecture that doesn't exist yet.
4) Agreed, will add a feature request for this.
5) We did consider this a while back, but the whole change scope UI is bad enough on the repositories page that we decided to leave it for now. I'll add a feature request for this.
6) This is a lot more complicated that it sounds.. Continua doesn't know how to read FB project files, and doesn't have access to them at design time. This is an area that will need a lot of R&D to figure out how to deal with. My expectation is that we will evolve both products over time to make them work together as seamlessly as possible.. but it will take time.
With regards to 6, couldn't you just enumerate the variables in Final Builder projects via a command line. E.g. FinalBuilder.exe {ProjectFile.fbp7} /ListVariables and have continua consume that output. You guys already do a lot of parsing of executable outputs very well, so modifying FinalBuilder.exe to help continua would be relatively easy code change IMHO.
That’s the easy bit, actually getting the fb project file is the hard bit (repositories are not currently capable of extracting just one file so we can play with it).