The artifacts tab on the build page shows a list of artifacts for the build. Each artifact listed displays a File Name, a File Size, a Created date, a MD5 hash of the file and a Relative Path. The relative path is relative to the workspace directory of the build.
The last column for each artifact listing can differ depending on the state of the build and the artifact type. Artifacts are registered while the stage is executing which happens on the Agent. The artifacts however need to be on the build server to be viewable or downloadable, which means at the end of each stage the agent copies the artifacts back to the build server. You will see a progress bar indicating the artifacts are not yet on the server.
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Once the artifacts are on t he build server they are downloadable and possibly viewable. All artifacts will be downloadable but only certain types can be viewed. When an artifact is viewable you will see one of two options [View] or [View As]. If you see [View] then Continua has only one way to view the artifact and that's by opening a new browser window allowing the browser to interpret how to view that type of file. For example, all documents except XML are artifact types which have only one view type which will be the. For images and XML you will see a [View As] link. Hovering over the link will show you the view options for that artifact. Both Images and Documents can be viewed as "Raw" artifacts which does exactly what viewing a text file does, it opens a new window and lets the browser display it. For Images you also have the option to view it as an image which just pops up a display box on the current page and display the image in it.
For XML files you have two additional options to select, "variables" and "nunit". When you open a nunit test output xml file using the nunit view type, you'll see the test output formatted in a tree view.
The "variables" view type is used to format the build's variable's data into a readable format. Each build automatically registers the build's variables as two artifacts, the machine's enironmental variabels in the format "hostname_Environment.xml" and the Continua specific variables as "VariableNamespaces.xml".
View-able artifacts are images (bitmap, png, jpeg, gif) and documents (xml, doc, txt, pdf), everything else won't be viewable.
Note: Viewing or Downloading of artifacts can be controlled through the "View Artifacts" permission. The default value is to allow users to view/download artifacts.