Using XL Release Gate Task for Deciding Future Tasks

For all of those working with XL Release, you must be familiar with Gate Task. You can provide conditions in a Gate Task which have to be all checked before you can actually complete the task. What if you could use those to programmatically check which conditions are met?  One caveat here of course would be to skip the task in case you don't want to check all conditions. Here's how it works

• Create a new XLR Template with a Gate Task and a Script task after that.
• You can add a manual step at the start and end of the phase to stop the execution and verify results of script execution.
• Add the following code snippet inside the Script task

def gatesBeforeTask(task):
  gatesList = []
  for item in phase.tasks:
    if str(item.getTaskType()) == "xlrelease.GateTask":
     gatesList.append(item)
    if item.id == task.id:
     break
  return gatesList
gates = gatesBeforeTask(task)
conditions = gates[0].getConditions()
for condition in conditions:
   print "Condition: " + str(condition.title) + " is : " + str(condition.isChecked()) + "\n"

• Then start a new release

• Continue with the manual task and complete it.
• Next Open the Gate Task.
• Select only gate2 and leave gate1 unchecked

• Skip Gate Task since you cannot complete it without both the tasks completed

• The script task will get executed automatically. Look at the output of script task once its completed

This prints out the value of the conditions based on which ones were checked or not   Now to use the same for Pre Conditions, this is what you can do

• Add two manual steps after the last(manual) step in your release

• In the first manual Step , add this code to precondition. Notice we are setting a result variable at the end of snippet

def gatesBeforeTask(task):
  gatesList = []
  for item in phase.tasks:
    if str(item.getTaskType()) == "xlrelease.GateTask":
     gatesList.append(item)
    if item.id == task.id:
     break
  return gatesList
gates = gatesBeforeTask(task)
conditions = gates[0].getConditions()
for condition in conditions:
 if condition.title == "gate2" and condition.isChecked():
    result = False

• Now execute the steps
• Based on the fact that the gate2 condition was checked, you would be skipping the first manual task and going directly onto second

  You can see how the step is skipped if the result is FalseHave Fun!!