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The next picture shows the property collector that was just created in the "Using" list of the PowerShell Action.
Why it's a good idea to use a property collector.
By not using property collectors you take away a lot of the benefits Continua offers. Unless you take additional precautions you will inevitably end up breaking a build or hindering the performance of builds. The best example of a property collector's benefits is when using an action which requires an executable be installed on the agent. Lets take NUnit for example and assume you haven't used a property collector for your NUnit Action and instead used a custom defined path. Here is where things can go wrong.
- Continua won't check if the path you provided exists before the build starts
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- (with a property collector it will), therefore it won't stop you from running a build. When this happens the build will fail if it can't find the path.
- Since Continua doesn't check the path before the build starts, it will send the stage to execute on the best available agent which could be an agent where you forgot to install the NUnit executables.
- The Agent Compatibility Matrix will report agents as compatible when there's a chance they aren't if you didn't install the NUnit executables.
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