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TFS 2015–The item may not be cloaked because it does not have a mapped parent.

I’m working on replacing the existing build system we use based on XAML Workflow by the new build system introduced in TFS 2015. So far, I really like the experience. Customizing became a lot easier than it was before…

However not everything is perfect. While building a solution I noticed the following error message:

“The item $/Framework en Tooling/Drops may not be cloaked because it does not have a mapped parent.”

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Let’s find out what was going on.

  • Open your favorite browser and navigate to the web access portal for your team project
  • Click on the BUILD tab
  • Expand the Build Definition section, right click on the failing Build definition and choose Edit… from the context menu
  • The build definition is loaded. Now click on the Repository tab.
  • On this tab you see the workspace mapping used for the build definition. In my case it looked like this:

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  • Seeing this immediately explained the error message. I was cloaking a folder that was on the same level as the folder I was mapping. With the current mapping configuration the Drops folder would never be downloaded to the local workspace, so it didn’t make any sense to cloak it(and that was exactly what the error message was telling me)
  • To fix it, the only thing I had to do was remove the Mapping line from the list
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