Over the next few posts, I'm going to try to talk about some of the lesser known features in FinalBuilder, and show some ideas and techniques that I hope will help you improve your FinalBuilder projects.
Wouldn't it be great if a failed action could automatically retry if it fails?
Absolutely, it's a great idea, and its a feature that's been in FinalBuilder for several years. Unfortunately it's not as obvious as it could be, we ran out of screen real estate a few versions back and it got pushed into another dialog (rather than add another tab!)
Note that this feature should really only be used when accessing a resource which might occasionally fail, for example we use this on our SignTool action when codesigning/timestamping the exe's because the timestamp server (Verisign's) sometimes fails to respond. We found if we ran the build again straight away, the timestamp server usually responds just fine, the server availability issue is usually transient and the retry option with a suitable pause resolves this issue nicely. It makes no sense to use this option on a compiler action though, as the result would most likely not change.
I wish I could define local Variables!
In FinalBuilder 7, you can! The Action Group action in FB7 allows you to define local variables. These variables are then available to all child actions of the Action Group action.
How can I capture and process the output of my custom executable?
We get ask this one quite often, so I guess we haven't done a great job of publicising the Output Monitors feature. Output Monitors are available on all actions, and they allow you to process the logged output of the action. A typical example of the use of output monitors might be to fail an action if a particular bit of text is output from the action.
Variable Suggestion (F12)
This is another one of those features that has been there a while but is not well known. I showed this feature to some of the newer developers here last week and got lots of "oh wow, I never knew that" type responses. I have to admit I'd forgotten about it myself until I started looking for ideas for this post! The way it works is that pressing F12 on a text field will drop down a list of suggestions on variable usage. The list is weighted so that variables that replace the most of the original string will list at the top. This is a great help in making sure you don't hard code paths when the project needs to run on another machine.
