Rebuild Selected and "Process Files"

[juklie]

General questions and thoughts:

If I understand correctly, it is not possible to select a step of type "process files" (and its child steps) and do a rebuild selected?

am I wrong?

And if this is true, then, if I had an action such as "Cleanup-Unregister all dlls in this folder" (using a process file step containing the unregister step)

then I wouldn't be able to just run this whenever I need to make sure the build machine is clean, or when I test portions of scripts or specific steps...

to me this would seem counter productive...

I guess if I want to run this type of actions, I either need to
a - use a run script : and have a custom script (or external script) to iterate and unregister using regsvr32
b - put the process files action in its own project? and call that... ?

it seems that just having the %procmask% macro was working much better (all in one step, rebuild selected is working, etc...)

of course I am not too familiar with build scripts and Visual Build Pro yet, so I may not see the obvious ...?

regards,
Julie

[kinook]

You are right. Rebuild Selected/Build Group can't be used in conjunction with the Process Files action+children. A few alternatives are:

1) Select the Process Files step, choose Build Selected Step (Alt+F10), select the step following the last Process Files child step, and choose Build to Cursor (Ctrl+F10)

2) Add a breakpoint following the Process Files children, select the Process Files step, and choose Build From Cursor (Alt+F7).

3) Put the Process Files + child steps into a subroutine, add a Subroutine Call step in the project steps, and Rebuild Selected can be done on the Subroutine Call step.

4) Continue to use %PROCMASK% (it will be available as long as VisBuild is installed prior to VisBuildPro).

Finally, we do have plans to support Build Group on Process Files actions.

[juklie]

Thank you for the alternatives.

I just tried them all and they work, except the subroutine one.

I had tried putting it in a project subroutine step and then use the call subroutine action and that doesn't seem to do the process files... today I tried putting the subroutine in the global subroutines section and still no luck.

I get the same output as if I had just tried the rebuild selected on the process file action...

julie

edited: aha. If I put the process files action in a group and put that group in the subroutine steps, then the call to process files subroutine works.

[kinook]

Good catch! Yeah, I forgot to mention that the Process Files step needs to be a child of a main subroutine step (can't be the entry step itself). And a Group step works well for that. We probably need to get that in the docs.