XplatGenerateReleaseNotes V3 selects wrong previous build

[dasMulli]

Describe the bug
When running the XplatGenerateReleaseNotes V3 task it selects wrong previous builds for comparison.
Running in Azure DevOps (Service) multi-stage YAML pipelines, I tried to use the task to generate release notes by looking for previous builds that successfully deployed to a specific stage.

However it finds very old pipeline runs that happen to match the stage requirement.

Initial debbuging shows that buildApi.getBuilds(..) in getLastSuccessfulBuildByStage (ReleaseNotesFunctions.ts) returns the builds in an arbitrary order. The second entry is a build from July 2020 (so nearly half a year ago) that happens to match the requirement.

Experementing with the query order parameter of getBuilds() - e.g. passing BuildQueryOrder.QueueTimeDescending - seem to be futile as well - the returned order changes but is still mixed (part lexically on the build number (which we override from within the build to a SemVer2 version) and part ordered by time).

The most successful approach I ended up finding was to do a client side sort:

--- a/Extensions/XplatGenerateReleaseNotes/V3/ReleaseNotesFunctions.ts
+++ b/Extensions/XplatGenerateReleaseNotes/V3/ReleaseNotesFunctions.ts
@@ -797,12 +797,19 @@ export async function getLastSuccessfulBuildByStage(
             }
         }

+        builds.sort((a, b) => <any>b.queueTime - <any>a.queueTime);
+
+        let foundSelf = false;
+
         for (let buildIndex = 0; buildIndex < builds.length; buildIndex++) {
             const build = builds[buildIndex];
             agentApi.logInfo (`Comparing ${build.id} against ${buildId}`);
             // force the cast to string as was getting a type mimatch
             if (build.id.toString() === buildId.toString()) {
                 agentApi.logInfo("Ignore compare against self");
+                foundSelf = true;
+            } else if (!foundSelf) {
+                agentApi.logInfo("Ignore compare since not yet passed the current build");
             } else {
                 if (tags.length === 0 ||
                     (tags.length > 0 && build.tags.sort().join(",") === tags.sort().join(","))) {

[rfennell]

Seems a reasonable approach to guarantee the order. I will have a that the PR my test harness

That said the build.id should be a unique incrementing int, it s not the build.buildnumber which is the one you can overload wit SEMVER or whatever you use

Thanks for debugging this