Configuration of email notifications tied to ticket workflow

Description

This plugin enables flexible configuration of email notifications tied to ticket workflow changes.

Administrators can configure any number of email notifications to be sent out when a workflow operation occurs on a ticket. Each email notification is specifically attached to one or more workflow operations, so for example separate emails can be sent out when a ticket is accepted, reassigned, resolved, reopened, or marked "in QA".

Each email notification's subject, body, and recipients are fully configurable by administrators, as Genshi templates which have access to the ticket's data, the comment (if any) that was left on the ticket, and the author of the change. Therefore notifications can be very flexible: some notifications can be sent to the ticket's reporter, others to its owner or CC list, others to the current updater, and others to hard-coded lists of users.

The notification emails sent by this plugin respect Trac's ALWAYS_CC and ALWAYS_BCC settings.

The notification emails sent by this plugin are independent of Trac's ALWAYS_NOTIFY_UPDATER, ALWAYS_NOTIFY_OWNER and ALWAYS_NOTIFY_REPORTER settings. Trac's built-in email notifications will be sent according to those settings, independent of this plugin's emails.

Bugs/Feature Requests

Existing bugs and feature requests for WorkflowNotificationPlugin are here.

If you have any issues, create a new ticket.

defect	6 / 10
enhancement	4 / 8
task	0 / 2

Download

Download the zipped source from ​PyPI.

Source

You can check out WorkflowNotificationPlugin from ​git://github.com/trac-hacks/trac-WorkflowNotificationPlugin using Git, or ​browse the source with Github.

Installation

Install the plugin's source code:

pip install trac-WorkflowNotificationPlugin

Enable its components in trac.ini:

[components]
workflow_notification.* = enabled

Add its component to your list of workflow providers, after all other workflow providers, for example:

[ticket]
workflow = ConfigurableTicketWorkflow, TicketWorkflowNotifier

Now you just need to configure some notifications, see below for details and examples.

Configuration

General configuration

Configure one or more notification emails attached to workflow events using a ticket-workflow-notifications section in trac.ini. See the ​Trac documentation for information on the available attributes of the Ticket object.

Within this section, each entry is a notification email that may be sent out for a ticket. Here is an example:

[ticket-workflow-notifications]
notify_reporter_when_accepted = accept
notify_reporter_when_accepted.body = Hi ${ticket.reporter}, '${ticket.summary}' has been accepted \nby ${change.author}. Its status is now ${ticket.status}. \n\n{% if change.comment %}${change.author} said:\n${change.comment}{% end %}\n-----\nTicket URL: ${link}\n${project.name} <${project.url or abs_href()}>\n${project.descr}\n
notify_reporter_when_accepted.recipients = ${ticket.reporter}, trac-admin@hostname.com, trac_user
notify_reporter_when_accepted.subject = '${ticket.summary}' is now accepted

The first line in this example defines the notify_reporter_when_accepted rule. The value in this line defines one or more workflow actions that will trigger this notification: in this case, the notification will be triggered when the "accept" action occurs for any ticket. This action is defined by the default configuration of Trac's built in ticket workflow engine; however, any action that is defined by the configuration of your installed ITicketActionControllers may be used.

We could also define a notification to occur on multiple workflow actions, using a comma separated list of workflow actions:

notify_owner_changed = accept, reassign

Multiple independent notifications can be configured for the same workflow action; in the above examples, both the notify_owner_changed and the notify_reported_when_accepted rules will be triggered when the "accept" action occurs.

The following lines define the email subject, body, and recipients for a particular notification. These are all Genshi Text Templates that will be rendered with a context that includes the ticket (in its current state AFTER the workflow action has been applied); the author and comment of the current change, if any; a link to the ticket as ${link}; and the project.

All of these must be defined for each notification; the plugin will raise errors at runtime if a notification is missing any of the .subject, .body or .recipients definitions.

The .recipients definition should be a Genshi template that renders to a comma separated list of email addresses and/or usernames known to Trac. In the above example we combine a dynamic variable based on the ticket's current state, a username known to Trac, and a hard coded email address:

notify_reporter_when_accepted.recipients = ${ticket.reporter}, trac-admin@hostname.com, trac_user

Conditional notifications

In addition to the required configuration fields described above, you can optionally include a .condition definition for a notification. If provided, this should be a Genshi text template which evaluates to the value True if and only if the notification should be sent. If the template evaluates to any value other than True, the notification will be skipped.

If the notification should be sent unconditionally when it is triggered, the .condition line should be set to ${True}.

One use for this would be sending a notification when a ticket is resolved 'fixed':

[ticket-workflow-notifications]
when_fixed = resolve
when_fixed.body = Ticket ${ticket.id} has been fixed! View it here: ${link}
when_fixed.subject = Ticket ${ticket.id} is fixed!
when_fixed.recipients = ${ticket.cc}
when_fixed.condition = ${ticket.resolution == 'fixed'}

But you could get as complex as you want with this feature:

magic_word.condition = ${'notifyme' in change.comment and change.author != ticket.reporter}

owner_changed.condition = ${old_ticket.owner != ticket.owner}

Notifications for new tickets

Most notifications are configured to refer to one or more workflow actions, like accept, leave, reassign, resolve, etc.

You can also configure notifications to be triggered when a ticket is newly created. To do this, use the special workflow action @created like so:

[ticket-workflow-notifications]
new_ticket = @created
new_ticket.body = New ticket ${ticket.summary} has been created
new_ticket.recipients = ${ticket.owner}
new_ticket.subject = New ticket created

Notifications for all actions

You can also set the special value * for a notification, which means it will be triggered on every workflow action. However it will not be triggered by ticket creation:

[ticket-workflow-notifications]
ticket_changed = *
ticket_changed.body = View the ticket here: ${link}
ticket_changed.recipients = username, another_username
ticket_changed.subject = Ticket ${ticket.id} has changed!

To trigger a notification for every workflow action as well as ticket creation, just specify both:

[ticket-workflow-notifications]
ticket_changed = *, @created

Notifications when no action has occurred

A workflow action always occurs when a ticket is changed, even if the user doesn't explicitly select a workflow action! In the standard Trac configuration, the default action is "leave". So you could set up a notification like so:

same_status = leave
same_status.body = View the ticket here: ${link}
same_status.recipients = username, another_username
same_status.subject = Ticket ${ticket.id} has been edited!

Accessing old ticket values

The ticket's old values are available in the notification templates. These values are provided in a Python dict named old_ticket. The values provided are from before any changes were made to the ticket, whether by workflow operations or by direct user action.

You can use this dictionary to set up a notification similar to Trac's built in ticket change email, for example:

[ticket-workflow-notifications]
ticket_changed = *
ticket_changed.body = Ticket changed by ${change.author}: ${change.comment}\n\n{% for field in old_ticket %}{% if old_ticket[field] != ticket[field] %}\n${field} changed: ${old_ticket[field]} => ${ticket[field]}{% end %}{% end %}
ticket_changed.recipients = ${ticket.reporter}
ticket_changed.subject = Ticket ${ticket.id} has changed!

Using blank lines in the announcement emails

As the examples above show, you can add blank lines by typing "\n" in your email template. The plugin's code will parse these "\n" strings into actual newline characters. So, for example, this configuration should result in an email body with four blank lines between the two sentences:

notice.body = Notification for ticket ${ticket.id}: ${link}\n\n\n\nThis is a notification.

This seems to work more reliably than using the trac.ini file's own multi-line syntax which apparently collapses whitespace.

Meanwhile, if there are any newlines whatsoever in your .subject configuration, the plugin will replace them with spaces. This ensures that your email will have a valid subject (email subjects cannot contain newlines).

Emailing all commenters on a ticket

You can access a list of all users who have participated on a ticket (leaving a comment, changing a field value) as well as the actions they took with the variable change_history. This will contain a list of dicts, each with an "author" key, as well as "field", "oldvalue", "newvalue", and "time", ordered from oldest to newest.

This can be used to construct a recipient list for everyone who has left a comment on a ticket:

[ticket-workflow-notifications]
ticket_changed = *
ticket_changed.recipients = ${','.join(list(set(i['author'] for i in change_history if i['author'] != 'anonymous' and i['field'] == 'comment' and i['newvalue'])))}

Or you can email everyone who has ever participated on the ticket:

[ticket-workflow-notifications]
ticket_changed = *
ticket_changed.recipients = ${','.join(list(set(i['author'] for i in change_history if i['author'] != 'anonymous')))}

Or you can email everyone who has ever updated a particular field on the ticket:

[ticket-workflow-notifications]
ticket_changed = *
ticket_changed.recipients = ${','.join(list(set(i['author'] for i in change_history if i['author'] != 'anonymous' and i['field'] == 'milestone')))}

This can also be used in the email subject, body, and condition templates.

Recent Changes

Check the project's Github page for recent changes: ​https://github.com/trac-hacks/trac-WorkflowNotificationPlugin

Author/Contributors

Author: ejucovy
Maintainer: ejucovy
Contributors: