I can no longer pass empty string as argument values

[mattleibow]

What You Are Seeing?

I can no longer run cake like this with an empty string:

dotnet cake --prefix=""

What is Expected?

The argument in the cake string returns either null or an empty string:

var prefix = Argument("prefix", "");

// prefix == ""

What version of Cake are you using?

1.0.0

Are you running on a 32 or 64 bit system?

64

What environment are you running on? Windows? Linux? Mac?

Windows and macOS

Are you running on a CI Server? If so, which one?

DevOps and local

How Did You Get This To Happen? (Steps to Reproduce)

No need for any special cake file, this is the tooling.

Output Log

dotnet cake --prefix=""

Error: Expected an option value.

       --prefix=
               ^ Did you forget the option value?

[nils-a]

@mattleibow as said, this is a feature - or rather it's side effect of Cake 1.0.0 being able to accept flags in addition to key-value-arguments.

@devlead described it in stack overflow

One key difference with Cake 1.0.0 is that it beyond keyvalue arguments (--key=value), supports flags (--flag), and multiple arguments with the same name (--key=value1 --key=value2). Which allows for much more flexibility than before.

As to you're question in gitter:

But this is not quite the same, I am passing a string, and empty string.
Unless this is equivalent and I can do --name ""

No, that's not equivalent.
You'd have to supply a default in your Cake file. Like so:

var prefix = Argument<string>("prefix", "");

(Which then has the drawback that you probably will get the same value as if the argument was not set.)

[augustoproiete]

TL;DR; in Cake v1.0, Use a (space) instead of = if the value can be empty/null.

dotnet cake --prefix ""

How do you pass empty arguments in Cake v1?

[RusKnyaz]

BTW, Executing:

 CakeExecuteScript("external.cake", new CakeSettings{
       Arguments = new Dictionary<string, string> {
           {"myParam", ""},
        }
   });

Leads to the same exception.

[nick5454]

In Azure devops yml, I pass like so: Configuration "$(Configuration)" and it works fine

[nick5454]

But, what I noticed is that it's hard to find info on the migration and just help on 1.1.0. I think a page that's easy find b y googleing "cake build 1.1 migration". You get release notes, but not a migration guide hit. It would be nice if there was a document called "Cake 1.1 Migration guide" that was crawled by the spiders...

[augustoproiete]

@nick5454 Is this not helpful? https://cakebuild.net/docs/getting-started/upgrade

More specifically: https://cakebuild.net/docs/getting-started/upgrade#cake-cli-updates

[nick5454]

@augustoproiete I trying to convey that a person who does pipelines 20% of his duties doesn't have time to really search and find info.

So when googling, it's hard to find these answers. Maybe the pages aren't being hit by the spiders, but if that came up in a google search ( or duck duck go ) then there would be less questions and it would be easier for people to upgrade.