Forum OpenACS Q&A: New Features for Bug Tracker

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Posted by Dave Bauer on
Over the years Solution Grove has developed some new features for Bug Tracker. Some of them were developed for our internal use of bugtracker. Some were partially funded by Carl Blesius and MGH. The latest work was funded by Robert Taylor, who made it possible for us to contribute this code back to the community finally.

The features are

- Create a new bug/ticket by email
- Allow upload of related files to a bug/ticket
- Add bulk actions, to reassign,resolve, or close multiple bugs/tickets
- Add email summary, this allows sending a email with a listing of tickets

These features are available in CVS HEAD now.

Additional work that is planned includes

- commenting/editing tickets by email
- configurable workflows/permissions to allow different types of access
- speeding up bug tracker
- adding AJAX enhanced UI for certain operations

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Posted by Emmanuelle Raffenne on
Hi Dave,

Sounds great. Would it be possible to use this version on openacs.org?

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Posted by Dave Bauer on
Sure i think it will work. It doesn't require any new features of OpenACS that I am aware of.

I will see if I can update it soon.

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Posted by Ryan Gallimore on
The new related files field is great, but it's only available after the first ticket submission. Can it be available in the first submission, so submitters can attach files?

A merge with openacs.org bt would be nice too, so we can finally have a full-text search in bug tracker.

Also, the fix for version field should be optional via parameter in case you want a support ticket system and not a bug tracker.

There's also a missing message key in workflow for the comments:

MESSAGE KEY MISSING: 'workflow.lt_creation_date_pretty_'

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Posted by Ryan Gallimore on
Regarding the bt search, I'd like to suggest the results be returned in list builder, so they can be filtered further, and the important fields viewed right away. I don't know if this is possible with tsearch2, but a replacement wildcard query in the list template would do the trick, afaik.

Currently, the openacs.org bt uses the search package and tsearch2 but does not narrow the search to the bt instance specified in p_id. It also doesn't provide meaningful descriptions.

A more involved enhancement would be to add text and/or drop down filters to each column of a list template. This would be an excellent addition to list builder in general. Currently searching for arbitrary data inside a list template is very difficult unless your data matches one of the filters.

What do people think? I'd like to try something like this, but I'd need some assistance from a developer with a bit more experience and commit rights.

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Posted by Dave Bauer on
Addining search to an existing list builder list is tricky to do in a database independent way. I have done it in Postgres only installs and it works fine.

I have done a per-column filter UI for listbuilder that is not quite ready to be ditributed.

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
This sounds great. Did you manage to get the notifications to work reliably as well (it did not seem to work so great in the old version). It is workflow related, but maybe you worked on it.

Additionally I was wondering if you want to up the version number. I think oacs-5-4 is at 1.5.x while head is at 1.4d4, so my installation got confused when I tried to upgrade.

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Posted by Dave Bauer on
Malte, i'll check the version number.

I have never noticed any problem with bug-tracker notifications, I haven't made any changes to that at all in relation to this new work.

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
Okay, good to know. The problems I am experiencing is on openacs.org if I only sign up for a component, I don't get the notifications, neither do they work if set to anything but instantly.

On my own instance of bug-tracker, they don't work at all and I am in the process of debugging workflow why that is the case, but with your E-Mail summary function it is even better as I can shove it under the developers nose whenever I want to, not when he thinks he likes to receive notifications.

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Posted by Dave Bauer on
Malte,

Thanks for that information. I can't understand why it doesn't work, and it might have something to do with workflow since that is what actually triggers the notifications.

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Posted by Ryan Gallimore on
Notifications on are working ok for me, but I found another problem on HEAD: the filters don't work at all.

Can anyone with bt from HEAD installed confirm this?

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Posted by Ryan Gallimore on
I found the problem. Query bug_tracker::bug::get_query.bugs was missing:

[template::list::filter_where_clauses -and -name "bugs"]

for some reason. I've fixed it and committed it to HEAD.