[Workflow-plugin] Matrix experiments

[Tomas Westling]

Hi,

I am experimenting with the workflow plugin, to see if we can replace some of 

our quite complicated job setups at Sony Mobile (chains of builds calling builds of other

projects, among them matrix projects) with workflows.

I assume setups like ours should be the perfect target for changing to workflows, since it

is very hard to get an overview when everything is split up in lots of different projects and having

everything in one flow would help (as well as being able to use durable steps).

I haven't really gotten the Matrix part of our jobs working though.

The way I have tried to get a matrix project working as a workflow is through nested for loops

and using the parallel step. Is this the best way to emulate a Matrix project and if so, is there

a working example on how to do it somewhere?

Br Tomas Westling,

Sony Mobile Communications 

[Jesse Glick]

On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 6:36 AM, Tomas Westling
<tomas.w...@sonymobile.com> wrote:
> I haven't really gotten the Matrix part of our jobs working though.
>
> The way I have tried to get a matrix project working as a workflow is
> through nested for loops
> and using the parallel step.

This demo

https://github.com/jenkinsci/parallel-test-executor-plugin/blob/3cab169421793c322d2a37bb24f48f7ec2fe31dd/demo/JENKINS_HOME/jobs/flow/config.xml

shows how you can launch a bunch of things in parallel on different
slaves (though for a somewhat different purpose).

> Is this the best way to emulate a Matrix project

I think so. The obvious thing which is missing is any tabular
visualization of the results. In other words, you can make your flow
set up any axes you like and build any combinations you like, but
Jenkins will be ignorant of the meaning of any of this, so it cannot
display history per combination, or a graphical overview of the status
of all combinations in a given build. This is one feature CloudBees
has considered as an Enterprise extension, though there are aspects
that might require special integration APIs that could only make sense
in OSS. I have not had time yet to think about the implications in
detail.

[Tomas Westling]

Thanks for the info, I will continue experimenting with parallel steps then,

Br Tomas