Integrating Code Inspector with Continious Integration Tools

Question

Hi everybody,

outside the ABAP-world there is a large number of tools available, both commercial and open source, that support the continuous integration within software projects. One part of theses tools it to execute any available unit test after each commit to the source code. The code inspector (SCI) within SE80 basically can do something very similar. Run unit tests, check for coding conventions etc.

I was wondering if the is a simple way to integrate the code inspector with existing tool, SAP external, continuous integration tools. I envision something like that after each transport or once per day SCI is executed and the results are made available in the external tool.

Has anyone here ever done something like that? Are there any existing solutions available for it of the shelf?

Thanks, Christian

Answer 1

What's the output from the SCI look like? If it is plain text or xml it should be trivial to accommodate from a variety of CI tools.

I'm most familiar with CruiseControl and AnthillPro and both of them could handle this without a problem.

Answer 2

Is SCI like a report in SAP? If so I also think it could be done but you would need to do a few things:

• An interface that allows the CI tool to start SCI.
• A way to get result back to the CI tool

The first thing could be done by an RFC call, but maybe it would just be good enough to use startrfc. The second might not be too hard either: Let the report save the output to some text file on the server that the CI tool can pick up. If you would write an RFC you could simply return the output. Obviously the integration would be tighter if you call an RFC directly.

If you use SapLink and Zake, you might also have the CI tool perform SCI based on Subversion check-ins. Without that you are "limited" to timed builds (e.g. nightly build).

Would be interested to hear if this works in case you are going to try.