Build Automator Blog

It's been quite a while since I posted on the blog! We have been so busy that time has just flown!

As some of you may know we are moving to Washington State. So we have been working on getting our house ready to sell and we decided to take some time off to work on that. That meant that other things slowed down in the meantime. But the house is now on the market and that means we are back to work

For the past week I have been working very hard on a new version of the Build Automator. We have a lot of exciting stuff that we are including in this new build and I'm just going to mention the highlights of what I've been doing.

First of all we have completed an update to the "Call MS-Build" action so that it can now work with Delphi 2007/RAD Studio from CodeGear. For this we needed to do some research into setting environment variables as the RAD studio does that when it shells out to the command line console for manual calls to MS-Build.

We have also completed new actions for Setup Factory and MSI Factory from IndigoRose. Every thing looks good for both actions and we have not run into any problems at all with either product.

The Message action got a complete overhaul. You can now specify what buttons to show on the message box and also which one of those buttons (or none) should be a default button. The button value is stored in a variable that you can then use in conditions or whatever. Each button has it's own value in the system variables and you can use those to compare with in action conditions.

Today we completed a "Call DLL" action that is extremely powerful as it allows the Build Automator script to call function a dll and pass upto 6 parameters to the function. Currently the parameters are limited to char* parameters for C or CONST *CSTRING in Clarion since the Build Automator's data is entirely based on CSTRINGs. We may add support for multiple data types later on. The function must return an integer value which is passed on to the $ExitCode$ variable for you to use in later actions if needed. If you need to pass data from your dll to the Build Automator script that cannot be confined to an integer, you could use an INI file or the registry to pass data back to the Build Automator.

Just because the datatype is a string doesn't mean you can't use if for numbers, they are just passed as strings so you may need to run conversion functions on them to convert them to the proper datatype.

This action opens up all sorts of possibilities for extensions to the Build Automator scripts and makes it a very powerful tool. If the Build Automator doesn't have what you need, you can simply create a DLL to do it and call it from the Build Automator!

The last thing we are working on for this new release is FTP uploads. This will be a simple action to start with that will simply take a list of files and upload them to a folder on a specified server. We plan on having this working today and finished off by tomorrow morning.

We also have a couple of smaller actions that we are working on. We have also improved the logging quite a bit so that it now shows the project line numbers and action item line numbers and the same information as the project action list in the program shows.

We are very excited about this new release and hope you are too

-- Arnor Baldvinsson