Get Release Management Datas With API REST TFS

Posted on September 16, 2016 Updated on September 17, 2016

Microsoft has released a documentation of the VSTS and TFS integrating REST APIs. In the recent past we were using the client object model and API to interact with TFS. But it was very difficult for client which don’t have .Net Framework installed, and after installation of this later, you must to have Visual Studio, install dependencies on TFS assemblies, know C# …..
Now you can interact with VSTS and TFS via POWERSHELL scripts, or another language, with simple instructions.
It implies also an openness to other technologies and also ease of use.
You specify different HTTP verbs (such as GET, PUT, POST and PATCH) and the connection point to a specific URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) to interact with the API.
In our post we will define the URI of our TFS server, our project collection and also that of the team project.

$UriCollectionProject =  $TFSInstanceURL+"/"+$ProjectCollection+"/_apis/projects?api-version=2.2-preview.1"
$CollectionResponse = Invoke-RestMethod -Method Get -Credential $credential -ContentType application/json -Uri $UriCollectionProject  

When pointing to TFS, you can pass a username and password (masked as a secret variable) through
So we must to add theses lines below

$User = "Aghilas.yakoub"
$Password = "MyPassword" 
$securePassword = $Password | ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText -Force  
$credential = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential($User, $securePassword)  

Us in this post we will try to list Releases runned by a specific person.
So secondly we will try to retrieve the list of team projects in a collection.
Emeber that a collection contains a set of project and a project contains a set of releases.
Below calling a GET on the URL of the collection.

$UriCollection =  $TFSURL+"/"+$ProjectCollectionName+"/_apis/projects?api-version=2.2-preview.1"
$CollectionResponse = Invoke-RestMethod -Method Get -Credential $credential -ContentType application/json -Uri $UriCollection

$CollectionResponse contains set of team projects.

foreach ($project in $CollectionResponse.value)
{
    $TeamProject= $project.Name 
	….
}

Now in a second time we will try to retrieve the list of release on a team project.
We will use the following suffix: /_apis/release/releases?api-version=2.2-preview.1

Ref : https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/integrate/api/rm/releases#get-a-release

#Construct URI for query team prpject and his releases
$Uri = $TFSURL +"/"+$ ProjectCollectionName +"/"+$TeamProject+"/_apis/release/releases?api-version=2.2-preview.1"

#Get response of previous uri
$releaseresponse = Invoke-RestMethod -Method Get -Credential $credential -ContentType application/json -Uri $Uri 

Now we must just get created releases by Aghilas

    foreach ($releaseInstance in $releaseresponse.value)
    { 
	If($releaseInstance.createdBy –eq “Aghilas”)
	{
             ......
        } 
    }

GC.Collect