Frequently Asked Questions

Why does a method defined in an outer scope takes precedence of a method defined in an inner scope?

The Groovy SDK loop methods (e.g. each) use the default closure resolve strategy OWNER_FIRST and thus methods from an outer scope take precedence over methods from inner scopes.

The problem can be solved by calling the delegate of the closure directly, as shown in this example:

def pipelines = [
    [name: 'foo', startJob: 'foo_start'],
    [name: 'bar', startJob: 'bar_start'],
]

nestedView('Pipelines') {
    views {
        pipelines.each { def pipeline ->
            // call delegate.buildPipelineView to create a nested view
            delegate.buildPipelineView("${pipeline.name} Pipeline") {
                selectedJob(pipeline.startJob)
            }
        }
    }
}

Avoiding each by using for loops will also fix the problem.

Why isn't my generated job like I was expecting, there was no error when the seed job ran?

Have you got the plugins installed in your Jenkins that the generated config.xml will refer to? If not, your the seed job may run, but you won't see any errors. Take a look in the Jenkins log for things like com.thoughworks.xstream.mapper.CannotResolveClassException: org.jenkinsci.plugins.multiplescms.MultiSCM ....

You may also need to restart Jenkins after installing plugins if the generated configuration is present in config.xml, but not shown on the job's configuration page.

How do I add a step in a particular order using the configure block?

job('example') {
    steps {
        shell('echo "first step"')
    }
    // configure the XCode builder plugin as second step
    configure { project ->
        project / builders << 'au.com.rayh.XCodeBuilder' {
            // add necessary elements here
        }
    }
    steps {
        shell('echo "last step"')
    }
}

Is there a Java binding for Job-DSL?

No, not at the moment. The DSL relies heavily of both closures for contexts and methodMissing / propertyMissing for XML generation. Currently there is no good Java equivalent of either of those. It's not to say that it couldn't be done, it'd just be ugly.