Support for pseudo child-tickets and a visual reference to these within a parent ticket.

Description

Some time ago I came across the problem of how to manage child tickets in a meaningful fashion, we were using coderanger's original MasterTicketsPlugin and it was great until we started to allow tickets to be viewed and created by people outside of our immediate development group. We found that people who were not familiar with our processes would simply create child tickets of the wrong 'type' and needed some help in getting it right. In addition, users found that the lack of visual information (ie. what are this tickets child tickets?) was also a hindrance.

Having child-tickets is extremely useful when it comes to managing multiple releases (ie. a single 'bug-report' ticket and a single 'bug-fix' ticket for each milestone/branch of development), for managing sub-tasks of an issue and for managing 'bug-fixes' required when developing a new (larger) enhancement.

This plugin modifies the ticket description box and adds a child ticket listing table and a 'create' button for adding new child tickets. It has the following features:

• It is possible to control in trac.ini the following aspects of child-ticket creation/viewing:
  • allow/disallow child-tickets for a certain type of ticket
  • to define the table headers displayed in the parent ticket
  • to define a default for the child type to be created
  • to restrict the type of child-ticket
  • to define whether the parent milestone is adopted by child tickets or not

Under Trac 0.10 I had to modify the ticket.html templates to get this working in any 'pretty' sense so I have not provided support for 0.10. As of 0.11, the ITemplateStreamFilter allows this to be incorporated nicely into a neat plugin. I have not tried it with 0.12 yet.

In order to keep the plugin as compact and simple as possible and to allow future compatibility with different CSS schemes, I have simply 'pinched' the existing CSS classes for generating the table and its components.

Configuration

The plugin makes use of the 'ticket-custom' field and so requires no extra db tables to be created. The following fields are required in the 'trac.ini' (see table below for a generic description of the options):

[components]
childtickets.* = enabled
childtickets.childtickets.tracchildticketsmodule = enabled

[ticket-custom]
parent = text
parent.format = wiki
parent.label = Parent ID

[childtickets]

# 'enhancements' : child tickets will typically be bug-fix tickets with the same milestone.
parent.enhancement.allow_child_tickets = true
parent.enhancement.table_headers = type, status, owner, summary
parent.enhancement.default_child_type = bug-fix
parent.enhancement.restrict_child_type = bug-fix, task
parent.enhancement.inherit_milestone = true

# 'bug-report' : child tickets will typically be bug-fix
parent.bug-report.allow_child_tickets = true
parent.bug-report.default_child_type = bug-fix
parent.bug-report.table_headers = type, priority, owner, summary, milestone
parent.bug-report.inherit_milestone = false

# 'issue' : child tickets will typically be task tickets with no default milestone.
parent.issue.allow_child_tickets = true
parent.issue.default_child_type = task
parent.issue.table_headers = type, status, owner, summary, milestone
parent.issue.inherit_milestone = false

# 'bug-fix' : child tickets are not allowed.
parent.bug-fix.allow_child_tickets = false

# 'task' : child tickets are not allowed.
parent.task.allow_child_tickets = false

[childtickets]

parent.<type>.allow_child_tickets	Define whether child tickets are allowed or not
parent.<type>.table_headers	List of column headers for display in parent ticket
parent.<type>.default_child_type	Default child type
parent.<type>.restrict_child_type	A list of possible child types, trying to create a child of a different 'type' will create an error.
parent.<type>.inherit_milestone	Define whether the child will adopt the parent ticket's milestone

Bugs/Feature Requests

Existing bugs and feature requests for ChildTicketsPlugin are here.

If you have any issues, create a ​new ticket.

Download

Download the zipped source from [download:childticketsplugin here].

Source

You can check out ChildTicketsPlugin from ​here using Subversion, or browse the source​ with Trac.

Example

Handling multiple bug-fixes for single bug-report

In my last job using trac with svn, we had a branch of development for each milestone of development plus a 'special' milestone to assign for hotfix/patches. Rather than creating a single 'bug-fix' ticket and commenting on the ticket that the fix had been applied to milestone X on branch X, milestone Y on branch Y, etc..., we would create a single 'bug-report' ticket (with version info but no milestone) and this ticket would, after assessment from developers/project-mgr, have a bug-fix child-ticket created per milestone - each with its own life-cycle, priority, (sometimes) developer, etc ...

Handling sub-tasks from a single issue

Probably self explanatory: you have something that needs to be done by several different people. Split it up into sub-tasks.

A New Feature generates bugs

When developing a new feature (a single ticket), our developers would 'finish' the feature and pass it to our testing department. The feature, on the whole, might be OK but require several days testing. Within that time several bugs are generated as a direct result of this new feature. It makes no sense to pass the original feature ticket back to the developers (the feature has not been 'rejected' and is still in testing!), so instead, the testing tem can make 'bug-fix' child-tickets for this parent ticket. The feature might even be released with known bugs but at least they're recorded and owned by someone/somewhere!

Recent Changes

18437 by Cinc-th on 2021-07-09 12:02:20

ChildTicketsPlugin: let user hide the description and table headers of child tickets using a preferences form. The preferences are saved similar to other ticket preference settings.

Closes #14036

18129 by Cinc-th on 2021-04-01 11:50:46

ChildTicketsPlugin: fix exception with admin pages when table header configuration referenced a ticket custom field which wasn't defined. Similar to [18126] but resolved differently.

18128 by Cinc-th on 2021-04-01 10:38:07

ChildTicketsPlugin: allow to specify a label for the ticket custom field parent when configured from the admin page.

(more)

Author/Contributors

Author: walnut
Maintainer: walnut
Contributors: