BUilding Flex project with unit testing on cruise control - apache-flex

I have a flex application build with actionscript 3 on flex builder with unit testing on it using flexUnit4. I want to build this project on my cruise control and i don't know how?

The easiest way is to have AIR installed so it can write directly to the file system, although there are other ways. From there, your buildbot can examine the output programmatically and pass or fail as desired. See the description on the Digital Dump Truck blog post for one such method.

Would this blog post be useful?
http://www.aaronspjut.com/mind/index.php/2009/05/23/continuous-integration-with-flex-3-cruisecontrolrb-and-flexunit4/
Sorry for the lack of information from me, I am not familiar with cruise-control.

Thanks Guys for the help,
Finally i managed to run flex on CI which generate my test results in html file. What i actually have to do is create a build.xml file which can run with ant. Build file has path to all the libraries of flex unit installed on pc or CC unit and the path to main file in your application. To build our project on Cruise Control you just need to edit the build.bat file on your CC.

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OpenCover in localhost with C# MVC 4 app

I just want to try OpenCover to get Coverage statistics from my app.
But I don't understand well how to use it. So here my questions?
Does the dll's have to be in the same directory? (my solutions have several projects)
Any example to get Coverage using OpenCover?
Is necessary to run the site in IIS Express or with ASP.NET development server is ok?
Thanks a lot!
I set up open cover as an external tool to make it easier on me.
Download the exe and drop it in a folder with as short a path as possible. then setup and external tool as follows:
Title : Open Cover {this is your choice}
Command: {your path to opencover}\OpenCover.Console.exe
Arguments: -register:user -target:"C:\Progra~1\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\TestWindow\vstest.console.exe" -targetargs:"$(TargetName)$(TargetExt)" -output:coverage.xml -targetdir:"$(ProjectDir)\bin\debug"
Initial directory: $(TargetDir)
Set it to use output window and close on exit. You will need to adjust the test runner program to suit you, i use vs2012, if you do too, that will make it easier on you.
To use it, click your test project in your solution explorer, then click on the open cover external tool and it will generate you the coverage report. I use it with Report Generator.
Set it up as an external tool too:
Title: Report Generator
Command: {Your path to report generator}\ReportGenerator.exe
Arguments: $(TargetDir)coverage.xml $(TargetDir)\coverageResults
Again, set to close on exit and use output window.
after generating your coverage report, you can then use report generator to create a nice looking html version that you can click through and see the stats.
hth
The docs that are installed alongside OpenCover carry a lot of useful information about running OpenCover. You should have a copy of this file https://github.com/sawilde/opencover/blob/master/main/OpenCover.Documentation/Usage.pdf in you download package (MSI/ZIP/NUGET)
The DLLs do not need to all be in the same directory but you will normally find that this happens due to the build process. Any assemblies that you want to gather coverage from will require that the PDBs for those assemblies to be in the same directory as the assembly or in the folder referenced by targetdir switch.
Yes you can use it to run iisexpress or the ASP.NET development server use the target switch.

Build Process in TFS 2010

I have read articles on build automation and it looks simple, but I am really not sure about parameterized build. I believe, there must be a xml file for that.
When we say build is automated, I believe it means our code/binaries sit in test environemnt. And all application related settings will also configured just by simple clicks of build, and push.
What are the required tools? What is MSBuild ?
Please put some light on it.
MSBuild is and exe that you run with command line tools and pass to it the project file (.csproj) which is an XML file as you said and it has all the instructions needed as you configured.
I created a series of videos that describe how to create simple MSBuild tasks and how to organize tasks and so on, for more info click on the following link:
MSBuild Tutorial
MSBuild is exe
When you run MSBuild from Command line
You will need to unload the projct so you can edit the (.csproj) or project file
The (.csproj) or project file
You are asking about build automation, and by your tags you menation TFS 2010 if so then you only need a cursory understanding of msbuild to get started. It is what eventually calls the compiler, but in all hoensty you need the step above it which are the build templates and defintions, along with how to set up agents and controller.
Here is a good overview document by Martin Woodward, this should give you enough to figure things out, or ask more specific questions

"Make" system for Actionscript?

In working on larger Actionscript/Flash projects, I've started to really feel the need for some kind of "make" system, but I haven't found it yet. Does anyone know if it exists?
Required features:
Ability to associate SWCs with their source code and/or FLAs i.e. "this swc is compiled from this source"
Ability to mark my current project as depending on these SWCs (either as compile-time or runtime libraries)
A single, big shiny button, that when pressed does the following:
Checks to see if any of the source files have changed, and if so, recompiles their associated SWCs
Recompiles and relinks the main .swf, if necessary
Runs the main .swf
Have yet to find a way to get something like FlashDevelop to do this (but I don't know it well enough to be sure). Support for both code and FLA sources is preferred.
You are looking for http://projectsprouts.org/ which is based on Rake the Ruby version of Make. It can do all of that stuff and much more.
If you have Ruby and RubiGems installed which I think are installed by default on Macs you can install it by typing this into your command line.
sudo gem install Sprout
It will take a while because it installs many things. After this is all set you can create a project like this.
sprout -n as3 ProjectName
and then build it with this,
rake deploy
It manges things based on the runtime they are created for, this project was created for as3 but all of the other types of projects also. The build scripts are all writen in Ruby and can be modified to involve more complex multi-step compiles pretty simply. It also has a bunch of generators so that classes automaticly have unit test that are associated with them and many other features.
Might be a stupid suggestion, but if you want make, why not just use "make"? You can use it for any language by defining the right rules.
Apart from that, I've seen a lot of Flex/Actionscript projects use Apache ant, an XML based build system.
As said by wump; why not use Make?
There are some ANT scripts included in the Flex SDK, so you could explore and expand those. I've also spoken to people who use Maven and Cruise Control for automated build process.
Here is some info on Maven Flex: http://code.google.com/p/flex-mojos/
And some info on Cruise Control w/ Flex: http://www.eyefodder.com/blog/2006/05/continuous_integration_with_fl_5.shtml
Well, there are several options. One I would recommend is the Maven plugin for Flex flex-mojos, now maintained on the Sonotype site. If Maven isn't your cup of tea, they do have an Ant plugin, I don't know if NAnt can call Java Ant tasks directly or not. The third is the most complicated, but Adobe does include an OEM version of the compiler, I believe it comes by default with the SDK download. This is the one I used in the Maven plugin I developed for my company. The reason we didn't use the flex-mojos one basically boils down to a...disagreement about the "Maven way" of one project = one artifact. Their interpretation is that 1 SWF file is one artifact, so is one Maven project. My definition for my project is that all 80+ modules, each a SWF file, are no different than JSPs, all bundled in the same WAR file. So I've got one project with a LOT of modules and 1 maven pom.
You could check out Antpile which according to said link "is a collection of Ant Scripts which cover everything from building a SWF, SWC, AIR, Android and even Unit Testing."

Best way to branch Flex projects using subversion

Here's our problem, we are a Flex shop that uses .NET for the server side logic. We use subversion for our source control and subeclipse in Flex Builder but are still quite new to using source control let alone subversion. Branching and merging seems to work very well on the .NET side but we are running into issues on the Flex side because of the final swf being built on our local machine.
The question is, what does a usual workflow look like for working with Flex and SVN? Particularly, how do you branch and where do you build?
Personally, I keep the Flash/Flex source code in a separate SVN repository that is away from what is deployed to any sort of web server. That way I can create branches and tags specifically for my Flash/Flex application. I also tend to publish any SWF's directly into my local copy of the deployment repository. It does not make sense to me to keep a published SWF under version control unless its part of the what is deployed to the server. I don't like to keep committing an SWF into my Flash source code repository because it takes up unnecessary space and all the source code should represent the latest version, not the resulting SWF.
You'd probably want to branch your project alongside your .Net project so your flex releases are consistent with your server logic.
We use a directory structure like this
+server-side-app
--trunk
--tags
--branches
+flex-client-app
--trunk
--tags
--branches
I would recommend something like that for yourself.
I agree with Matt W. At AKQA we have svn locations four our source and assets. We set up an svn ignore for the bin folders of a project. That way we aren't checking any swfs which means when we update we don't get someone elses swfs or output files.
A good bet is to look into continuous integration with something like cruise control. We build our output on the server which generates all of the files into one location on the server. There are loads of other benefits of continous integration and it's well worth having

Is there a way to get FlexBuilder 3 to treat a project as an Application and a LIbrary?

My team builds reusable libraries for other (internal) software development teams. We use FlexBuilder 3 as our development environment. Our SCM standards state that these projects must include test harnesses and a unit test runner, and (of course) we want to be able to use the debugger. For that reason, all the projects are Applications.
Our build scripts (used primarily by the CI system and for release deployment) build our actual libraries which works great. This approach is used so that FlexBuilder is not required to actually build our production artifacts (on the command line).
The problem is this - in order to have add a FlexBuilder Project to the Library Path for an Application it must be a Library Project. I have tried adding a nature to the project that we want included, but haven't gotten it to work yet. You would want to do that if you wanted to debug source files in another project.
A simple (yet annoying) work around is to include the source folder of the "library project" as a source folder in the "application project." It's annoying because it takes multiple steps to swap between a swc of the "library project" and the source folder of the project itself.
I would also suggest breaking this up into 2 projects. Have 1 library project and 1 application for the tests and the testrunner.
On a sidenote: FlexBuilder 4 will have support for running FlexUnit tests in the IDE, for both Flex applications and Flex library projects. So you won't have to maintain an application just for the sake of running the tests.
Assuming it is possible, I'd suggest adjusting your SCM standards to allow test harnesses and unit test runners to exist in other projects. Simply mandate that any library project must include a companion test project.
I don't know that this is going to make it any easier, but I would actually make the library and the testing harness seperate projects. This would allow you to source control each and would solve your problem with flexbuilder. Its not going to make it easier to work with, but it will be cleaner and the easiest to update.
I didn't totally understand the description of your situation, but if it's helpful, I'll describe how we have organized our Flex projects. The majority of our application code is contained within a SWC ("library") project. We then create two SWF ("application") projects - a "shell" application which represents the final output SWF, and a test harness FlexUnit 2 application. Both of these SWF projects reference the SWC project using a source path. Using this approach has made it trivial to enable unit testing for the application codebase in the SWC.

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