restarting build at a step
 

Newbie question, but I'm not seeing how to just starting building at the step of my choice in the GUI. I can right-click to get the "Rebuild Selected", but that just builds that step and then stops. Or I can choose to "Start from Cursor", but if that cursor (arrow) is not where I want then that doesn't help me, and I don't know how to move the cursor manually.

My workaround has been to do both, Rebuild Selected, immediately cancel, so now the cursor is where I want, then Start from Cursor, then press Play.

Surely there is an easier way to starting building at the step of my choice?

The 'cursor' referred to in Start from Cursor and Build from Cursor is the selected (or right-clicked) step, so one of those is what you want (Start does single-stepping, build doesn't). See http://www.visualbuild.com/Manual?methodsofbuilding.htm for more details.

Thanks for the explanation of the cursor.

In my use case, I am wanting to start rebuilding at a specific step which already has a status of "Built". Since it already has the status of "Built", the "Build from Cursor" immediately skips over that step.

So what I really want is a Rebuild from Cursor command, that would I guess clear out the statuses for all following steps.

This isn't a feature request, I'm just saying it's what I expected to be able to do, because my mental model of the tool was that it's a GUI front-end to a script, so I thought I should be able to start running the script at any step with a single click. I see now that it's actually more of the makefile/nant paradigm, where each step is a task/target with a status. (Well it's kind of a mix, because each step has a status, but the steps *also* have an explicit rather than dependency-driven order.)

FWIW.

You would need to do Build | Reset (Ctrl+Alt+F7 default shortcut) first in that case.

CTL+ATL+F7
 

Is there a way to script this, such that during the build you can flag all previous steps as default, similar to hitting, CTL+ALT+F7 so that the build would loop through those steps again?

I suppose some how I want to script to kick off a Restart...

not there yet
 

Yes understand setting macros and the conditional rules used with against them.

I have a build that goes through all the steps so say 6 out of the maybe 10 or so steps are completed. then it comes to a step let say, where by the conidtional rule of the machro is not met. Now I want somehow to reset all the previous steps and make the build restart over the whole process again...

It's the resetting of the steps with say VBscript that I'm having the difficulty with.

cab

I am trying to find the answer to the same thing. The goal is to operationalize a Visual Build project and allow the person on call to restart the project from the failed step without having to go to said step, right click, and start over.

Is there a method in the builder object that will allow this? I tried Builder.Start but it failed, as expected, because the process was already running.

That's normally automatic if restarted via Build | Start (F7).
http://www.visualbuild.com/Manual/methodsofbuilding.htm

What about looping a step.

For example:
We have a data roll process that repeats the same steps using different configuration settings. If we could somehow run steps 1,2,3 on step 4, set some other values to the macros and kick back to step 1.

Is there any mechanism to that within the GUI? I have a method for doing that with the API, but was wondering if it was possible within the GUI. This is similar to DTS (I know, it's a different technology, but perhaps someone on your staff knows how to use DTS?) and setting a task to waiting to force a loop.