Getting the information from Jenkins

The first step is to get our (programmatic) hands on the information. The simplest way to do this is via the XML API. This simply involves appending the /api/xml string to the URL for the job you would like to monitor, as shown here: http://yourjenkinsserver:8080/job/YourJob/api/xml.

Note

Note that there is also a JSON API available; if this suits your needs better—simply replace api/xml with api/json to receive the same information in the JSON format.

If you do this in a browser, you should see XML somewhat similar to my VeryBasicJob job:

The text returned by the API is simple and the XML is quite self-explanatory; a quick look through it shows that it contains all the information that you would want on the job you just queried—it just needs to be processed and interpreted. There doesn't seem to be much available in the way of documentation for these XML elements; however, if you start off with as simplistic a job as possible and then make changes and additions...