Prevent Scheduled Build from Running for Check-Ins Committed by Build Server

Question

Hi there,
I am using TFS 2013.
I have a scheduled nightly build that runs only when there have been check-ins.
The problem is that my build process checks-out/in a couple files used for custom versioning. This is done under the machine account of the build server.
Even though no check-ins were committed by developers - the scheduled build sees the check-ins done by the build server and thus, executes another nightly build.
Is there a way I can prevent scheduled builds from running if the only check-ins were from the build machine?
Cheers,
Keith

Answer 1

HI Keith,
I don't think we can achieve this kind of conditional trigger from TFS build definition. We had a similar situation so we disabled the TFS build and started the build using Powershell (windows scheduled task). Below is the powershell script. The scripts
gets the history for the day and checks for the user passed as parameter if even one changeset is not by the user the script will queue a build. 
Param(
$BuildUser = "Account\ToIgnore",
$TfsUrl = "http://ABCD:8080/tfs/Collection",
$TeamProjectName = "TeamProject",
$BuildDefinitionName = "BuildDefinitionName")
$today = Get-Date
$yestday = (Get-Date).AddDays(-1)
$Daterange = $today.ToString("Dyyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ssZ") + "~" + $yestday.ToString("Dyyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ssZ")
$tfsServer = get-tfsserver $TfsUrl
$Changeset = Get-TfsItemHistory -Server $tfsServer -HistoryItem "$/TeamProject/XYZ" -Version $daterange -User $BuildUser -Recurse
$Changeset | Out-File C:\Windows\temp\Output.txt
$TriggerBuild = $False
foreach ($user in $Changeset)
if ($user.Owner -ne $BuildUser)
$TriggerBuild = $True
break
if ($TriggerBuild)
[void][System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client")
[void][System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client")
$tfs = [Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.TeamFoundationServerFactory]::GetServer($TfsUrl)
$buildserver = $tfs.GetService([Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client.IBuildServer])
[Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client.IBuildDefinition] $BuildDefinition = $buildserver.GetBuildDefinition($TeamProjectName,$BuildDefinitionName)
[Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client.IBuildRequest] $BuildRequest = $BuildDefinition.CreateBuildRequest();
$buildserver.QueueBuild($BuildRequest) | Out-File C:\Windows\temp\Output.txt
Hope this help
Bharath
Regards, Bharath
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