Chris, Jenkins will re-generate the XML files when ever something is changed in the Project, like editing the config. There's no real way for Jenkins to re-create it identically using includes, since once it's loaded the model into memory it no longer knows what came from an xml include or not. You're going to have a real tough time taking this approach.
I would suggest looking at some plugins that work on generating the correct XML from "something" else. Like the Config Slicing plugin to do bulk changes. CloudBees has a Template plugin to store common configuration in a template job. There's dozens of plugins to help in this regards.
And to toot my own horn, there's the Job DSL (
https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Job+DSL+Plugin) plugin which can create the config.xml for you using a DSL. We use Perforce and have to deal with viewspecs too, but once we're in Groovy and have programmatic control it's trivial to build a good view spec based on some variables. We can generate dozens of jobs which are 99% the same, except for viewspecs, using a few lines of job dsl code.
-justin
On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 1:13 PM, Chris Wozny
<[hidden email]> wrote:
All,
I'm currently using Jenkins and the ClearCase plugin to maintain 30+ jobs. Many of our projects contain the same configurations and we are looking for a way to make one change to a general configuration instead of making that change in each project that is relevant as this can become very tedious every time we want to change a ClearCase config spec or email address in the job. Since most of the configuration is in XML, I attempted to add a DOCTYPE ENTITY into a job's config.xml file to "include" another XML file in it just to see if it would work. This other XML file contained the ClearCase configuration I wanted to use for multiple jobs. When I opened up the config.xml file in Microsoft's default XML editor, it understood the include and replaced the character entity with the XML in the external file. This showed me that my syntax and idea were sound. I then attempted to run Jenkins and my console was flooded with hudson.util.IOExceptions coming from hudson.XmlFile.read(). I looked at this file and it looks like XStream is the XML parser you are using. I'm not sure if XStream supports this functionality of including XML files in other XML files, but I wanted to see what you, the Jenkins' developers, thought about adding this functionality since it allows you to have one XML file define many config.xml files or sections within config.xml's. I'm sure I've butchered my words somehow, so I've included a link to the XML topic I'm referencing:
Locked
