Serious Utility Upgrade

Submitted by clavileno on 2007-06-18

Hi there

First, what a great application. There is much I would like to see done with this, but so much is there already in terms of the hard stuff - making an application that "real people" can use!

The main feature I'm looking for at the moment is critical to making this a really useful tool for users: customising the "main" display of Projects and Folders with additional columns.

The most useful thing for me would be to add a column showing which folders in which projects have issues that I created, which folders in which projects have open issues that are assigned to me.

The immediate problem I see with this is defining what is an open issue that is assigned to me. One thought is to have a default attribute that is always added to every issue type such as "open / closed". This attribute would have to be capable of being deleted by an administrator (it wouldn't make a lot of sense for "knowledge base only" issues, for instance), but would then allow the column display.

The reason for this? I've only been using this for an hour or two now, but already I have several users who are clearly going to end up being members of 10-20 "projects" with several folders each. Unless I'm going to accept that they spend 10 minutes every hour or so looking through all of the folders for issues to deal with, there is going to need to be some sort of "dashboard overview" capability so they can decide where to look for new things to deal with.

I'd also like to have other such tools, such as showing me where any critical issues were, or those with a pending due date, or whatever, but I suspect this is all part of the same thing?

Hello,

Thanks for your comment!

The feature you're describing is on my to-do list. The details are yet to be planned, but I imagine it more or less like this:

  • users subscribe to folders they want to watch (if they have a lot of folders it would be useful to auto-subscribe to all folders by default)
  • the contents of the subscribed folders are periodically updated
  • information columns can be added to the main view containing the number of issues matching a given condition (which is similar to the filter in the folder view)
  • a notification message appears when there are new issues matching a given condition (this has lower priority, so maybe in a later version)

If you have some more thoughts or suggestions in this area, please share them.

I realize that this feature is quite important, so I'll try to do it asap, possibly by the end of July.

Regards,
Michał

Hi

As I've said elsewhere, thank you so much for the rapid responses!

Your approach is great, if we can define the client parameters (what is subscribed-to) on the server. If this is just done on a per-client basis (i.e. this user on this PC) then this isn't all that useful in many cases, because we'd need to have a human configure every client PC every time we want to change what they see by default.

I've got an interim suggestion, prompted by your comment about clickable IDs, although it is a bit of a kludge...

If we create a project for each user, containing folders of type "Issue Links" named "Assigned to Me", "Created by Me", etc. We run a cron every 5 minutes to create issues in those folders from the rest of the system which just comprise of the name of the issue and a clickable link to the issue.

As I say, a complete kludge, but it does mean that users can quickly find what they're looking for.

Perhaps equally that creates a model for a wider facility? As I've said elsewhere, there doesn't need to be an actual cron, just a part of the server code that uses a refresh as a trigger and says "if I haven't done this for 5 minutes, do it now".