Pipeline to use artifacts from 2 projects associated by the same git branch name - jenkins

Question

the company where I work for is evaluating jenkins 2.71, in particular the pipeline and blue ocean plugins. We already tested also GoCD and we need, as in GoCD, a way for a pipeline to automatically fetch the artifacts from 2 other pipelines (taking the last successful result of each one of them), here our case.
We have these initial pipelines (build & run tests), which reflect 2 projects:
frontend, ~ 15 minutes
backend, ~10 minutes
I created a pipeline called configure (~1 minute), with e.g. a parameter called customer-name, which takes backend and frontend files and puts them together, then applies specific customer specific configurations and customizations and produces deployable artifacts. Instead of "customer-name" I could also parallelize this job to create all the artifacts for each customer at once, separated in different directories.
The next pipeline would be to deploy them on different test servers separated for each customer. This could be also part of the same configure pipeline, we still have to see how to put things together in jenkins...
Ideally, I need configure pipeline to be triggered automatically (or also on demand) after each frontend or backend success and take as input the last successful artifacts from these 2 pipelines, but not just having the last successful build, we need as dependency the git branch name.
E.g. we have:
backend branches:
master
release/2017.2
frontend braches:
master
release/2017.2
In the pipeline editor, I found a Build Triggers option and set it as follows: Build after other projects are built > Projects to watch: frontend, backend > Check Trigger only if build is stable or better in my test environment full of failures Trigger even if the build is unstable.
Searching further, I found Copy Artifact Plugin
But now the big question, how to fetch the last successful artifacts from these pipelines with the same git branch name?
Because we don't want to mix e.g. a backend build of "release/2017.2" with frontend "master", it has to find as the last successful build having the same relationship or parameter or whatever you wanna call it, in our case the association is the git branch name.
Is it possible to achieve this? If yes, how?
The copy artifact plugin seems to work in a freestyle project. Would it work in a pipeline? That's also a concern...
Thanks

Answer 1

Yes, the Copy Artifact plugin does work in both freestyle and pipeline projects; pipeline uses the copyArtifact function that I referenced in my comment. Note that if you go to the Pipeline Syntax link, it's kind of hidden: you have to first select "step: General Build Step" from the drop-down, then it will give you the Copy Artifact pipeline command builder.
I'm going to assume that your frontend and backend projects are built as multi-branch pipelines, as that would probably be easiest to maintain so that you don't have to keep creating new projects for every release. You can reference these projects from other projects by referencing <project name>/<branch name> (sometimes I've had to replace the / with %2f instead, I think mostly on freestyle projects). You could then set up your configure project as a parameterized build (either pipeline or freestyle), say with a string parameter of PROJECT_BRANCH_NAME. Then put in the following in your frontend/backend project pipeline scripts to trigger a build of your configure project
build job: 'configure', parameters: [[$class: 'StringParameterValue', name: 'PROJECT_BRANCH_NAME', value: ${env.BRANCH_NAME}]]
Then you should just be able to make your configure project reference the frontend/%PROJECT_BRANCH_NAME% and backend/%PROJECT_BRANCH_NAME% (or ${env.PROJECT_BRANCH_NAME} in a pipeline script) when copying the artifacts.
Also, is there a particular reason why you're evaluating specifically Jenkins 2.7? 2.7 is a year old now, and there have been a few new LTS releases since then. I'd recommend staying reasonably up-to-date unless you know there's a specific reason you want 2.7.