Customize TFS gated check-in message suffix ***NO_CI***

Question

TFS build templates have the NoCIOption property that drives whether all gated check-in messages have ***NO_CI*** appended. This in turn optimizes away the daily continuous integration (CI) build if all the check-ins since the last CI build have been gated ones.

However, in my environment, the set of tests run during a gated check-in is much smaller than the set of tests run during a CI build, to achieve reasonable gated check-in latency, and we therefore want to run the CI build even if there have been only gated check-ins since the last CI build; this makes the prominent "NO_CI" marker as it stands quite confusing.

Furthermore, it would be nice if we had some kind of direct reference from the commit message to its respective gated check-in build number, for example from code history.

Is it possible to customize the commit message during gated check-in, so as to include the build number in it?

I have been looking at SyncWorkspace properties but saw nothing obvious.

Answer 1

At the moment we don't have a way to customize the commit message at this time. If you want the CI build to run after the gated checkin then you simply need to set the NoCIOption to False a CI build will be triggered after the check-in.

Answer 2

I don't think it is possible to get the NO CI message into a gated builds check in. Maybe you could consider using a Scheduled Build instead of a CI build to ensure your larger test set gets executed regularly.

Answer 3

Is it possible to customize the commit message during gated check-in, so as to include the build number in it?

No, this would not be possible. The build number is generated as part of the build script's execution; in order to display it at the point of checkin you would have to wait for the build to have started, which it may not always do immediately (e.g. if your server has to queue the build).