Building a checkbox in your VSTS custom build task

Update 5/25/2016

Since May 6th 2016, this is default functionality in VSTS. Look for the Checkbox Control section in this post! https://www.visualstudio.com/news/2016-may-6-vso

Today I was building a custom build task for the new build system in VSTS. I read the documentation and started to work on the task.json.

Besides some strings I wanted to have as a parameter, I also wanted a checkbox to represent a boolean. Like here in the Publish Test results Task

This is pretty easy, in the task.json you can add an input of type boolean, like this

{
"name": "EnableVerboseLogging",
"type": "boolean",
"label": "Output verbose logging",
"defaultValue": "false",
"required": false,
"groupName": "output",
"helpMarkDown": "Check this option if you want extended logging enabled"
}

I use a powershell to execute the real work, I had a powershell that received a boolean as parameter, like this

param(
[bool]$EnableVerboseLogging
)

But when I executed the build task, I received an error

System.Management.Automation.ParameterBindingArgumentTransformationException: Cannot process argument transformation on parameter 'SetWorkItemNewStatus'. Cannot convert value "System.String" to type "System.Boolean". Boolean parameters accept only Boolean values and numbers, such as $True, $False, 1 or 0. ---> System.Management.Automation.ArgumentTransformationMetadataException: Cannot convert value "System.String" to type "System.Boolean". Boolean parameters accept only Boolean values and numbers, such as $True, $False, 1 or 0. ---> System.Management.Automation.PSInvalidCastException: Cannot convert value "System.String" to type "System.Boolean". Boolean parameters accept only Boolean values and numbers, such as $True, $False, 1 or 0.

It seemed that the powershell script that you are calling can only receive strings. They should be converted to Boolean in the powershell script. So I changed the powershell script to.

param(
[string]$EnableVerboseLogging
)

[bool]$EnableVerboseLoggingBool= Convert-String $EnableVerboseLogging Boolean

and used the new parameter instead and everything worked fine !

Other useful links for building a custom task

• https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/integrate/extensions/develop/add-build-task
• https://www.simple-talk.com/sql/database-delivery/writing-build-vnext-tasks-for-visual-studio-online/
• http://blog.devmatter.com/custom-build-tasks-in-vso/