Using another branch to generate release notes

[jlowe-SFDC]

Hi @rfennell

I would love to use this extension but having a few issues. Hoping you can help clarify...

Here's my current (high level) process that I'm struggling with. I'm not sure I can do what I need very easily using this...

• We create a task which specifies the git branch we are releasing as a related artifact. This is a branch which contains all changes for a sprint.
• When a tag is added to the Task, it triggers a webhook, which in turns kicks off the pipeline build.
• In the pipeline's YAML, I find the task and the related git branch, clone the repo and then check out the related branch. I can see in the logs that HEAD is now at my last change which has a tag to a given work item Id.

The task runs (using v4) but the release notes generated are still blank. In the output file, I can see that it is still referencing ref/heads/main via the buildDetails.sourceBranch. So I assume by manually doing a checkout for a specified branch doesn't update these variables and therefore the task just runs against main.

My use case means that we have to go to a release board and show documentation for what we are about to release to the higher environment so I can't really run this off main after release and need to specify the branch, or a commit Id to compare against.

Is there a better way to do this?

[rfennell]

At it's core the task used the Azure DevOps API calls that return the commits and WI changes between two pipeline runs.

A limitation of these API calls is that you must

1. be comparing runs of the same build definition
2. be on the same branch

So, yes, I think the fact you have 'special checkout handling' is the root of the problem.

I would look at either

1. Generating the release note as you merge the sprint branch back into main - but you said this was not really an option
2. Add the task to the CI build, run the pipeline once on the sprint branch (it will find no Commits/WI), note the run ID, and add this as a parameter OverrideBuildReleaseId to the task, so the task always generates release note comparing against this build ID i.e. the first build on the sprint branch. You should then get sprint release notes

[jlowe-SFDC]

Thanks for the quick reply @rfennell. Is the run id the build Id or are these two different things?

[rfennell]

Yes, the buildid is the number you want, the mistake people make is confusing the build definition ID and the build run ID