wiki:ChildTicketsPlugin

Version 24 (modified by Mark Ryan, 12 years ago) (diff)

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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 / restrict the type of child-tickets
  • to define which fields are inherited by child-tickets

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.

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.

NOTE: The configurability of this plugin has been ported to the Subtickets plugin. See the patches in issues 9-12 at github. -- Chris Nelson

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, component and keywords.
parent.enhancement.allow_child_tickets = true
parent.enhancement.restrict_child_type = bug-fix, task
parent.enhancement.table_headers = type, status, owner, summary
parent.enhancement.inherit = milestone, component, keywords

# '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 = component, keywords

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

# '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.parent-type.allow_child_tickets Define whether child tickets are allowed or not Default: False
parent.parent-type.table_headers List of column headers for display in parent ticket Default: summary, owner
parent.parent-type.default_child_type Default child type Default: See [ticket] section of trac.ini (default_type)
parent.parent-type.restrict_child_type A list of possible child types, trying to create a child of a different 'type' will create an error. As of version 1.1.0, if this option is used, a list of submit buttons will be rendered allowing the user to decide which type of child ticket he/she wants to create. Default: None
parent.parent-type.inherit Define a list of inherited fields. Default: None
default.max_depth Limit the creation of too deep a hierarchy. Default: 5

Issues / Caveats

  • If you change the behaviour of the parent type (using for example allow_child_tickets/restrict_child_type) and tickets already have child tickets assigned to them you will not receive a warning about any possible conflicts until you try and modify any of the child tickets.
  • If a parent ticket is restricted in some way that no further child tickets can be generated for that ticket 'type', you'll continue to see a list of child tickets but the 'Create' button will be missing.
  • The 'parent.<type>.inherit' option ensures fields are inherited by child tickets, However, all child tickets (regardless of type as defined by 'restrict_child_type') will inherit these values.

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.

Examples

Some examples here.

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.
18127 by Cinc-th on 2021-03-31 20:17:47
ChildTicketsPlugin: properly wikify content of text fields in child tables if field format is set to wiki.

An example is the parent ticket custom field which now has proper links to parent tickets.
18126 by Cinc-th on 2021-03-31 19:24:00
ChildTicketsPlugin: fix exception when table header configuration referenced a ticket custom field which wasn't defined.
(more)

Author/Contributors

Author: walnut
Maintainer: walnut
Contributors:

Attachments (8)

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