OpenGauntlet: Settings File

The settings file (settings.xml) is the main configuration file for OpenGauntlet, and this file should be customised to your needs before running OpenGauntlet with any command line switches.

The settings file is an XML document which contains two main sections; a global section for settings that affect all areas of OpenGauntlet, and a profiles section which defines one or more profiles which run OpenGauntlet for different branches / TFS servers independently of each other.

Global Settings

The settings defined in the global section are:

• SmtpServer: The SMTP server OpenGauntlet should send emails through. It is imperative that this is functional and the build user can connect to the port specified below (and relay, if required)
• SmtpPort: The port on the above server the SMTP service is running on
• TfsUsername: If you are using integrated authentication to run OpenGauntlet then you can leave this (and TfsPassword) blank, otherwise, enter the username (including domain, e.g. YourDomain\Username) to use when connecting to TFS
• TfsPassword: The password for the above account
• DefaultEmailAddress: If OpenGauntlet is unable to determine the user's email address from TFS, the email(s) will be sent to this address. This should be an administrator's account if possible
• ConnectionString: The connection string to use to connect to the OpenGauntlet database
• WorkspaceFolder: This is primarily defined for OpenGauntlet to create 'Emergency' workspaces, in case a user has shelved a pending change against a file that is not included in OpenGauntlet's workspace mapping. A temporary workspace folder will be created in this directory to reshelve the user's changes. Ensure the build user has sufficient NTFS permissions on this folder

Profile Settings

You can define multiple profiles for OpenGauntlet to run builds on separate branches, projects, or even TFS servers. Most people will probably only want one profile. There are a couple of points to remember if you define multiple profiles:

1. You can only have one build running for a team project on the same build server. Therefore, if you want to run OpenGauntlet separately for two different branches in the same team project, you will need to run the TFS builds on two different servers. The easy way round this is to create your branches in different team projects if possible.
2. The shelveset prefix needs to be unique across profiles and other instances of OpenGauntlet, otherwise people's changes will get rejected because they are being run against the wrong branch / project.

The settings available in the Profile section of the settings file are:

• TeamFoundationServer: The TFS URL to connect to. This must be in the format protocol://servername:port, for example http://MyServer:8080
• WorkspaceLocation: The local path to the temporary workspace for this profile, for example C:\OpenGauntlet\Workspaces\MyProfile
• TeamProject: The TFS team project name you are working with for this profile, e.g. Test Project
• AllowedPath: Check in requests are always restricted to the team project specified in TeamProject, but you can further lock this down if you have several branches in your project and would only allow users to check into one of them. e.g. $/Test Project/MyApplication Development
• ShelvesetPrefix: The string users should prefix their shelveset name with in order to mark them for queueing for this profile. For example, if you specify GC- as the ShelvesetPrefix then a user could name their shelveset 'GC-My check in request' in order to get it processed by OpenGauntlet
• TeamBuildType: The name of the TFS build OpenGauntlet will use to test the user's changes. This can be found under 'Team Builds' in Team Explorer
• BuildUser: The domain and user to run the TFS build as (same as the build user you run OpenGauntlet as)
• BuildMachine: The TFS build server to run the build type on
• BuildDirectory: The directory on the build machine to run the team build in
• LogFile: Specify a filename here to log all activity to a file. Leave blank to pipe log messages to standard output

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© Leon Mayne 2007