SF and unattended builds

[crewsr]

My company is in the process of evaluating some different installer packagers. We (I) already use APMS and like it, so We (I) thought I would check out SF. I downloaded the trial version and created an installer for one of our smaller software products, which turned out to be actually much easier than I thought it would be.

My question is: How does SF handle unattended builds? We do a nightly build or our software products which is entirely scripted. I'm not entirely savvy on the build process, but I know we feed a control file into our current installer packager (Installshield 5.5) which has the names and paths of each of the 1000+ files that are created during the compile process. When something new is added to the software, a new entry is added to the control file (stored in VSS).

Working with the SF was a process of manually creating a more-or-less static list of files and their source paths to be included in the installer, but since this may change on a nearly daily basis, this approach won't really be feasible.

The literature and help mention unatteded build processes, but from what I read did not go into too much detail of what is or isn't possible with this product. Can the file list be external to the project? Am I looking in the wrong place?

[pww]

you can include a folder reference in your project. Then SF will automatically include all the files in the selected folders (masks are supported) when building an installer.

[Brett]

Like pww said, Folder references are often useful for that kind of thing. If not, then the other option is to edit the project file directly. It is in XML format so it would not be too hard to manipulate the project file using XML code before the build.

[crewsr]

A folder reference should work as long as:

Everything in the source folder is something to be added to the install package

and

Everything in the source folder is going to the same install destination.

Unfortunately, I'm fairly certain that both those circumstances are broken in our builds. However, editing the project XML might work. Thanks for the input!

[Dan Ullman]

A folder reference should work as long as:

Everything in the source folder is something to be added to the install package

and

Everything in the source folder is going to the same install destination.

Unfortunately, I'm fairly certain that both those circumstances are broken in our builds. However, editing the project XML might work. Thanks for the input!

You can also use wildcard + extension. For example, source\\*.AAA goes to installfolder\\here_is_A while source\\*.BBB goes to installfolder\\Here_is_B.

In this case, anything not ending in .AAA or .BBB does not get put into the installation.