Creating link to TFS Reports in build script

· August 7, 2008

Tools - TFS - MSBuild

For a few days (on and off, not continously) I’ve been searching the net for some way to present code coverage data in a nice way. That is - when our build script is running tests under code coverage we don’t present the code coverage result.

The code coverage data is located in the TRX-file generated by MSTest. And there is a great tool, trx2html, that I’ve already blogged about. But that tool doesn’t show the any code coverage result.

Here I must add that I know these two things:

  • firstly the main part of the code coverage data is only interesting to the developers and might not benefit from being shown to others. But I just want to show that 97% of our code is covered by out unit test. Calms the project management…
  • secondly - it might be a simple thing to tweak the internal XML Transformation of the trx2html-tool. But it doesn’t feel good to have tweaked third party code in a professional environment.

OK - after a long while I realized that TFS is, out of the box, giving us some reports. One of the is called Builds and simply shows a list of all builds, with code coverage data in place.

So I ran that report, which opens in the browser, and it did the trick; it shows the right amount of data at a reasonable level.

Now I just needed to create a link to the report and put it in the drop-folder for our build so that all persons interested could see the latest results. Here is what I did - not pretty, but it works;

  • I browsed to the report and dragged the link (the little icon in the url-field) to my desktop
  • I opened that “Internet shortcut” in Notepad and copied the entier content
  • Then I added a txt-file to my solution and pasted the content of the Internet shortcut into that file. For some reason you can’t add a Internet shortcut to the solution.
  • Then I created a MSBuild target that copies the file to the drop location and change its file-extension to .url. Here is my target:
   <!-- Target that creates a link to the builds report -->
  <Target Name="SkapaLankTillByggRapporten">
    <BuildStep TeamFoundationServerUrl="$(TeamFoundationServerUrl)"
               BuildUri="$(BuildUri)"
               Name="CreateLinkFileToBuildReport"
               Message="Create link to build report"
               Status="Succeeded" />
    <Message Text="Create link to build report" />
   <Copy SourceFiles="$(SolutionRoot)\Solution Items\Tools\BuildReportLink.txt" DestinationFiles="\\$(DropServerName)\Drops\$(AppName)\TestResults\BuildReportLink.url" />
  </Target>
  • Finally I made my build script call that target

As I said - maybe not a very pretty solution but it sure came through for us and helped us report code coverage data in a nice way.

Oops - almost forgot… To reconnect to the title of this post. This “technique” can of course be applied to any report in TFS or other URL-addressable resources.

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