After some further investigation I came up with a solution for this which seems to work fine:
I found out that even though you did not get any information about the custom build properties using the "/builds/?locator=buildType:x" call, you could extract the build ID for each one of the builds in that list and then do another REST call to get more details about one specific build. The rest call looks like this:
http://teamcity/httpAuth/app/rest/builds/id:{0}
The response from this call will give you a "build object" which contains a list of build properties, among other things.
My solution for tracking the build progress was then like this:
When a build is added to the TeamCity queue, I first add a property to the URL called "BuildIdentifier". The value is just a GUID. I pass this identifier back to the client application, and then the client starts polling the server, asking for the status of the build with this specific identifier. The server then goes through some steps to identify the current stage of the build:
1: Check if the build is running. I get the list of running builds with the call "/builds?locator=running:true", iterate through the builds and use the build ID to query the REST API for details. I then go through the details for each running build looking for a build with a matching "BuildIdentifier" property to the one I received from the client. If there is a match in one of the running builds I send a response with a message that the build is running at x percent (PercentageComplete property of the build object) to the client who is tracking the progress. If a match is not found I move on to step 2.
2: Check if it is finished: First get the latest build list using the "/builds/?locator=buildType:x" call. Then do the same thing as in step 1, and extract the X latest builds from the list (I chose 5). In order to limit the number of REST calls I set an assumption that the build would be in the latest 5 builds if it was finished. I then look for a match on the BuildIdentifier, and if I get one I return the status of the build (FAILED, SUCCESS, etc.).
3: If there was no match for the BuildIdentifier in step 1 or 2 I can assume that the build is in the queue, so I return that as the current status.
On the client side I poll the server for the status every x seconds as long as the status is saying that the build is either in the queue, or running.
Hope this solution could be helpful if there are someone else with the same problem out there! I would think that tracking the progress of a triggered build is a pretty common task if you use the TeamCity REST API.
Best Answer
You can get all the builds for a particular project or build config like this:
You can filter these results to only show the most recent successful build like this:
Use a script to load the href from the build returned by the above url and you can get the "lastChanges" element, which always contains the ID of the last change.
You can then send the link below to trigger a build that will only include changes up to that ID like this:
NOTE: The ID attribute in the lastChanges element is the one you want to use as the modificationID. This is not the actual change ID from your VCS though. This is an internal Team City ID.