Apache Bloodhound : Batch create tickets from wiki list

Abstract:

Apache Bloodhound is a software development collaboration tool, including issue tracking, wiki and repository browsing. A major part of issue tracking is creating tickets on issues. Currently Apache Bloodhound provides a method for creating tickets by filling a form with relevant information. But as it provides the functionality just for add one ticket a time, for a user who requires to create a large number of tickets could be really tedious process. So the major idea of this project is to implement a functionality which will make it possible for the users to batch-create tickets by converting WikiFormatted tables into set of tickets.

Idea

Built on top of Trac Apache Bloodhound is a software development collaboration tool, including issue tracking, wiki and repository browsing (see:http://bloodhound.apache.org). Bloodhound extends Trac (http://trac.edgewall.org/) with multiple product support, advanced search functionality, ticket relations, a simpler installer and sleeker user interface. Apache Bloodhound recently graduated from the Apache Incubator as a stand-alone Apache project.

Apache Bloodhound makes itself uniquely special by providing significantly great user experience. So while improving the core functionalities, maintaining and improving the current user experience is really important for the projects development. After completing this project it will boost Apache Bloodhound into a new better user experience level.

Apache Bloodhound already provides a method for the users to track issues by providing functionality of creating tickets. It is a dropdown form which contains the some of the relevant fields to be filled and saved in the backend database. Somehow if the user requires to fill one or more of the other fields that doesn't display in the dropdown he will be redirected into a new page which contains the complete form of relevant fields. If the user just wants add one ticket at a time this method will work fine. But if the user wants to a large number of tickets he has to go over and over again through this process which will be really  exhausting experience for the user. As I mentioned earlier one of the major power of Apache Bloodhound is it's great user experience. So it is really necessary to provide a separate method which will make this process easier for the users.

So the proposed idea is to provide functionality for the users to batch-create tickets by just converting an existing wiki table into tickets. That is the users will be able to create a 'ticket table' with a simple macro.

Format of the macro will be:

[[TicketTable(numberOfTickets)]]

(Figure 01)

Figure 01

As it conveys the macro takes an user argument "number of tickets" that the user is going to add to the ticket table. Then the macro will be able to render a table with required fields as column headers and "numberOfTickets" number of empty rows to be filled by users. After filling the table the users will be able to click on the save button which will be positioned under the ticket table and batch-create tickets. After that the wiki page will be modified, that is the table will be modified into a normal ticket query table where the ticket id and ticket summary will be links redirecting to appropriate tickets that have been created.(Figure 02 and Figure 03)

Figure 02

Figure 03

When retrieving the tickets it is required to identify the tickets that have been created. For that the idea is to retrieve based on the creation time. For that it will be require to extend the TicketQuery macro to handle absolute time stamp values.(Figure 04)

[[Widget(TicketQuery, query="created=2007-01-01 00:00:00..2008-01-01 23:59:59", max=10, title=Batch Created Tickets)]]

Figure 04

And obviously in an organization where they use Apache Bloodhound as there issue tracking tool they will be a need to control the use of this functionality. That is this functionality should not be given to each and every user in the organization. Because miss using this functionality will lead into a huge mess as it is capable of creating huge numbers of tickets by a single click of the user. So the idea is to create a new permission level for using this functionality. Admins of the organization will be the only ones who will granted with this permission level 'TICKET_BATCH_CREATE' by default, and they will be able to grant it to other users as they wish.

However the best thing about this feature is ,as this uses simple macros which can be used within wiki syntax, the users will be able to use this anywhere  where it supports wikiFormating. So hopefully this will be a real nice feature which will increase the usability of Apache Bloodhound significantly.

Time Line

About me

I’m Dammina Sahabandu a third year undergraduate at University of Moratuwa (Department of Computer Science and Engineering) which has had the most Google Summer of Code students for an impressive 7 years in a row. And currently I’m doing my internship at WSO2 which is completely open source middleware organization who has a really close relationship with Apache Software Foundation[2]. In WSO2 I’m working in the ESB(Enterprise Service Bus) team which is built upon Apache Synapse and Apache Axis 2. So I have great experience on working with open source community and have a good idea about their standards. And working with large code bases is my everyday work.

Also all the technologies related to this project are very much familiar to me. So I feel really confident and looking forward to complete this project successfully.

[1] http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2013/07/google-summer-of-code-full-of-stats.html

[2] http://wso2.com/