Custom reports for Hudson CI

Question

Hello. My past CI experience is tightly coupled with CC.Net, but for sake of innovations I want to try Hudson server as CI Server. I wondering, is there a possibility to embed into build report custom reports, by transforming XSLT output of various tools that runs on CI? For example, I have hand-made IIS Log parser, that outputs XML, is it possible to include it's result into build log and fail build on certain condition?

Answer 1

I'm not sure of your goals, so let me answer a couple of different ways.

To get things into the build log, just output the data to stdout from your build scripts/process. You can dive into any individual build and look at the output from the Console link.

For a proper report, you'll need to generate the HTML document. I believe there is a generic plug-in that provides a link on the page. It's probably your best route. If you want a custom link, with icon, you'll need to write your own plug-in.

If you want graphs to show up on the project pages, you will need to write your own plug-ins.

From a code perspective, the plug-in architecture isn't too complicated. However, Hudson is built with Maven, which means you almost have to use the Maven tool set and framework to build the plug in. Maven, if you haven't used it, is probably the largest part of the Hudson plug in effort. I wish they offered similar APIs in a manner that didn't require taking on so much knowledge/experience overhead, but I suspect that would be significant architectural change at this stage.