Skip source checkout in specific pipeline phase

Question

I have a Azure Pipeline which consists of 2 phases. Phase 1 builds our solution and publishes the artifacts and phase 2 downloads these artifacts and runs our automatic tests on it.

As we are still stuck with a TFVC repository and therefore can't use YAML pipelines, I couldn't figure out, how to prevent phase 2 to checkout the sources in our classic (designer) pipeline.

I found out, that the following variables could do something like that, but I don't know how to set them up to just affect the second phase:

• Agent.Source.Skip
• Build.SyncSources

UPDATE 1:

I tried to change the value of Agent.Source.Skip in phase 2 right before the checkout is done. Unfortunately the variable is readonly and can't be changed:

Thanks so much in advance for any help or input!

Answer 1

I removed Agent.Source.Skip from the variables tab and now the approach described in UPDATE 1 works.