Monday, December 21, 2015

Using Powershell to Manipulate TFS Get Latest, Check In, and Merge

In our environment, changes made in the Test branch have to travel through the Main branch and into the Release branch to be deployed into production. Sometimes changes need to move through quickly without regard to other changes, especially in an environment where there may be a single coder. Note: the following code will merge all checked in code regardless of who checked it in. Be careful in multi-coder environments.

While PowerShell is being used to write this process, many of the commands below are actual command line directives. These older, mature commands have more features than the native PowerShell TFS commands and are documented more extensively.

The first line in the PowerShell script should be the Set-Location command. This will set the scripts working location to the location of the TFS workspace. In my instance it is “C:\Development”.

set-location c:\development

Next, the comment that I want attached to the “Check in” of the changed files to each branch.

$Comment = """123456"""

In order to keep from typing the full path of the TF.exe on each Merge and Checkin, a variable is used to hold the file location.

$CommandLocation = "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\TF.exe "

Since there are multiple branches that need to be merged and checked out, I’m hard coding the GET command for each branch. Basically, it gets the latest version of each file (not including your changes) from each branch. This is done to keep merge confilcts to a minimum.

$GetDevCommand = " get $/<TeamProjectName>/<DevBranch>/<Directory> /recursive /force "
$GetMainCommand = " get $/<TeamProjectName>/<MainBranch>/<Directory> /recursive /force "
$GetReleaseCommand = " get $/<TeamProjectName>/<ReleaseBranch>/<Directory> /recursive /force "

<TeamProjectName> is the name of the Team Project you are working in under the Team Collection.

<xBranch> is either Dev, Main, or Release in this instance.

<Directory> is the name of a directory (and possible subdirectories) below the branch. This can be as granular as needed in that <directory/subdirectory/subdirectory> can be specified. The /recursive flag recurses through all subdirectories under the <Directory> and /force causes them to be overwritten.

The same hard coding occurs in the Merge and Checkin commands below

$MergeToMain = " merge $/<TeamProjectName>/<DevBranch>/<Directory> $/<TeamProjectName>/<MainBranch>/<Directory>/recursive  /version:T"
$CheckinToMain = " checkin /comment:$comment /recursive /noprompt ""c:\development\<TeamProjectName>/<MainBranch>/<Directory>"""

$MergeToRelease = " merge $/<TeamProjectName>/<MainBranch>/<Directory> $/<TeamProjectName>/<ReleaseBranch>/<Directory> /recursive  /version:T"
$CheckinToRelease = " checkin /comment:$comment /recursive /noprompt ""c:\development\<TeamProjectName>/<ReleaseBranch>/<Directory>"""

Once you enter the TeamProjectName, Branch, and Directory, the work of moving files in TFS can begin. This is accomplished with the Start-Process command.

By using the –wait and –RedirectStandardOutput flags, each command executes sequentially and redirects the output from each command to its own txt file for troubleshooting later.

#Get Lastest Files From Sources Control
Start-Process "$CommandLocation" "$GetDevCommand" -wait -RedirectStandardOutput c:\temp\Get-TFS.txt
Start-Process "$CommandLocation" "$GetMainCommand" -wait -RedirectStandardOutput c:\temp\Get-TFS.txt
Start-Process "$CommandLocation" "$GetReleaseCommand" -wait -RedirectStandardOutput c:\temp\Get-TFS.txt

#Merge and Checkin to Main
Start-Process "$CommandLocation" "$MergeToMain" -nonewwindow -wait -RedirectStandardOutput c:\temp\MergePreProd-TFS.txt
Start-Process "$CommandLocation" "$CheckinToMain" -nonewwindow -wait -RedirectStandardOutput c:\temp\CheckinPreProd-TFS.txt

#Merge and Checkin to Release
Start-Process "$CommandLocation" "$MergeToRelease" -nonewwindow -wait -RedirectStandardOutput c:\temp\MergeProd-TFS.txt
Start-Process "$CommandLocation" "$CheckinToRelease" -nonewwindow -wait -RedirectStandardOutput c:\temp\CheckinProd-TFS.txt

In this instance the output for each command is directed to a file the in the C:\Temp directory for viewing later.

Enjoy!

TFSMergeCheckin.ps1

6 comments:

  1. Hi, thanks for share your knowledge. I have a question: do you know if there is any possibility to specify the changeset that we want to Merge? I understand that if we use Merge command this will merge the latest version of the directory. But sometimes we want to merge an specific changeset. Thanks in advance for your answer. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Use /version:C#### where "####" is the changeset number
    e.g. tf.exe merge /version:C2313 $/Source/Folder $/Target/Folder

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi, the TFSMergeCheckin.ps1 is not there anymore. Is there anyway I can have it download again? Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Binh, try this link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/amd888j2jcjd62s/TFSMergeCheckin.ps1?dl=0

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi, do u know how can we get the files from particular label

    ReplyDelete