TeamCity users: a few questions

Question

These questions are for TeamCity users only

1) Is it possible to configure TeamCity to extract build artifact information based on your own your regular expressions? This is exactly what Pulse does here

2) Does TeamCity integrate with any task/bug tracking tool? like JIRA?

3) This question is for people who run static code analyzer only. A tool like PC-Lint/Visual Lint can generate XML reports. Can TeamCity be configured to parse these artifacts and generate a build failure?

4) I'm currently evaluating TeamCity right now...there community forum doesnt seem to be very active. For those who pay for support, how is Jetbrains support? Is it good? Atlassian seems to be much better.

Answer 1

I am a little confused about this question because my use of TeamCity, TC (and I guess the design principles of TC) is to allow the build script (and not TC) to remain the correspondent of build imperatives.

In other words, if you need TeamCity to do something cool, just add that cool stuff in your build script either using an existing task in your build system or write one yourself.

TeamCity supports NAnt, MSBuild, Ant and am sure, any other build platform you can install on on the buildagents.

The only integration I will want TC or any other CI platform to have is source control integration with my choice of SC. The rest of the integration should be controlled by my build script. That way, I only configure my TC once at the beginning of project for each project and then, don't touch it ever again. In contrast, the build can change per version.

So, the indirect answer to your question is Yes, theoretically, through the build script.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

1. TeamCity allows to get build artifacts with a Ant-based pattern. You can specify multiple patterns and set target directory for each pattern. Read more at http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/TCD4/Build+Artifact

2. There is an integration which allows to link RF-3432 to the Jira issue. More advanced integration may appear in the next release of TC. Read more at http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/TCD4/Mapping+External+Links+in+Comments

3. Only with custom plugin. Or your build process can send a specific "echo" message which will change build status and description.

4. OK, I'm JetBrainer. May be we don't response immediately, but we strive to answer forum questions ASAP. Paid customers also have e-mail support.

Hope this helps, KIR

Answer 3

Disclaimer: I don't work for JetBrains! But I've worked with Pulse and TeamCity in my current job.

Build Artifacts: Yes, TeamCity will export artifacts that remain after a build. You can add define ant-style wildcard patterns to match files (the default pattern matches any files left in the root build directory). These files can be seen from the project view against each individual build.

You can use special service commands in a build script to immediately export artifacts along the way too, I do this for a code complexity tool that generates xml files, for which I've also defined a custom graph.

Bug Tracking: I don't have experience with this, but KIR pointed out some alternatives.

XML Parsing: You can control this with ant. I included a third-party tool called andariel in my build that can run XPaths across xml documents, then used service messages to export the result (in this case a count of methods exceeding a complexity limit) to be displayed in a custom graph.

I believe you could also publish the artifacts, provide TeamCity with an XSL to render the XML, and create an additional tab in your build results to display it (however I have not done this)

Tech Support: I've found the community forums to be pretty good, most questions I've had answered within a day or two by both civilians and Jetbrains employees, and I was using the free 'Professional' version. I can only imagine that email support will be just as good if not better!