Is it possible to make release notes tool to consider the environment?

[bhirnyk]

Hello @rfennell,
First of all thank you for the wonderfull Release Notes generation tool.
I have a CD pipeline that deploys app to different environments using deployment job.
Currently it looks like XplatGenerateReleaseNotes@4 is not considering the environment when it looks for the previous successful run.
Is it possible to address this issue?

[rfennell]

If the correct parameters are set the task considers the stage to look for the last successful run

Have a look at wiki for more details

[bhirnyk]

@rfennell if you meant this page - I've checked it. But the only parameter that seems applicable for my situation is overrideBuildReleaseId. But in this case I need to first somehow determine that previous build and it looks like non-trivial task.
Could you give another hint on this?

[rfennell]

You could use overrideBuildReleaseId but that in 'hard codes' the historic build to compare against. So does need some manual management as time goes on as you will wish to compare against new builds as the project proceeds

The section I meant was the 2nd option

Option	Multi Stage YAML	Classic Build/Release
Generate notes for just the current build	Requires checkstages=false parameter	Run inside the build
Generate notes since the last successful release. Option 1. Place the task in a stage that is only run when you wish to generate release notes. Usually this will be guarded by branch based filters or manual approvals.	Requires checkstages=true parameter	Run inside the release. Supported and you can override the stage name used for comparison using the overrideStageName parameter
Generate notes since the last successful release. Option 2. Set the task to look back for the last successful build that has a given tag	Requires checkstages=true and the tags parameters	Not supported
Generate notes since the last successful release. Option 3. Override the build that the task uses for comparison with a fixed value	Requires checkstages=true and the overrideBuildReleaseId parameters	Run inside the release. Requires the overrideBuildReleaseId parameter

You set checkstages=true so it looks for historic runs where the current stage completed without error. You can supplement this with overrideStageName if you want to check for successful completion of the stage other than the current one the task is in.

The way we do it is have stage dedicated to release notes generation that is only run, either manually or via branch protection rules in certain circumstances e.g. deployed to Live

I go through all of this in this community conference session video that might help

[bhirnyk]

Approach with tags worked fine for me, thanks!