Is it possible to tag a Bamboo build only if a particular variable is set?

[charlesgutjahr-ourcommunity]

The "VCS Tagging" task works great at tagging our Subversion repository with a custom variable — but only when we remember to fill in that custom variable. Is there any way to configure the VCS Tagging task (or a job that contains it) so that it only runs if a tag name has actually been specified?

To be specific, we've set up a plan in Bamboo with a custom variable called ReleaseVersion. Its default value is blank. Then one of the jobs in the plan has a VCS Tagging task with the tag name:

${bamboo.ReleaseVersion}

If we run the plan by chosing Run Customised... and specify a value for ReleaseVersion then it tags everything correctly with the value we set. However if we just run the default plan it fails because nothing has been set in ReleaseVersion — unsurprisingly we get this exception:

Error occurred while running Task 'Tag Subversion(1)'. This build will fail. Caused by:

com.atlassian.bamboo.task.TaskException: Exception when tagging repository

...

Caused by: org.tmatesoft.svn.core.SVNException: svn: Path 'svn://repository.local/SG/tags' already exists

Basically it's trying to apply an empty string as a tag.

Is there any way to configure Bamboo to skip the task — or the job — if the tag or variable is empty?
We don't want to tag every build, so we don't want to specify the variable every time!

[Przemek Bruski · Accepted solution]

In your case, it's best to create a script task that will tag or not depending on the variable content.

[charlesgutjahr-ourcommunity]

Good to know that it's not possible with the internal VCS Tagging task.

It does sound to me like a useful feature to add in a future release, though!

[Matthew J. Dovey]

I agree that it would be a useful feature - I've created a jira request for a slightly more generalised feature

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BAM-11257

[Matthew J. Dovey]

It would be a useful feature if any task could be run conditionally on the value or existence of the variable, including the VCS tagging task.

I've made a feature request here for this: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BAM-11257