My story with Webissue

I would like to share some of my experience in using Webissue, why and what I patch it. Michal said he will find some inspirations from my patch and will find ways to implement them in future version.

I work for a university and I have two work areas: (1) supervising students (2) monitoring (mostly collect and do aggregate report) the research related activities of the lecturers. They are different in scale: a dozen of students and about 200 lecturers .
However, there is some common traits about the workflow
1. People should be able to create issue to summit their work. This is the main source of issues created.
2. Each one can see only their own (for privacy)
3. After they created issue, I will revise, give rating about this work, and approve it or not. People must be able to see this rating approve status, but they cannot change it.
4. Once an issue is approved, it will be locked so even the creator cannot change it anymore.
5. In some case, I want to be able to add some information or short comment relating to the work, but make it confident between me and my assistant. The author of the issue should not see it.

Apart from that, I also want to have an announcement area where I can put notices. The notices have two types
6. Some notices I want people can read but do nothing
7. Some others I want people can still give feedback (by comment), but do not change other information. For example I announce a seminar and want people be able to reply if they attend, but cannot mess up with information about date, time, ...
8. And I want that only me and my assistant can create notices (issue) here

9. All the processes are watched by controller/auditor officers. They want to see what happen, and in some case they want to give comment, but they are not allowed to change directly any thing. So they can only read, or at most give comment.

10. I want to keep some extra information with user, for example their phone, address

This mean I need a way to
- In general, give detailed right to edit. Some can create issue, but some can edit or comment, some can read only so I can define a member for controller (this solve number 9 and some other situations)
- For number 2, restrict member view of issue to their involvement. This can easily be done by creating project and assign each member into their own project. Actually, I still use this way for working with my students. But creating more than 200 projects for lecturers is something I want to avoid.
- for number 3 , a way to restrict edit of particular attributes to project admin only, while allow member to still see them and edit other attributes
- for number 4, Lock a particular issue so it cannot be changed by anyone except project admin.
- for number 5, a way to hide particular attributes so only project admin can see it. Of course, this also means only PM can edit this field. Making some comment private is also one solution
- Number 6,7,8 can be solved with detailed access level for member, but I am lazy, I want to make a announcement project public, so any registered member can see (so I don't have to remember to add new users to announcement project). So it is desirable to be able to restrict a particular folder readonly, or comment only
- Number 10, extra user field to store user information

Of course, one easy solution is to use a system like Redmine. But I love Webissue with it elegant UI and powerful but flexible design. So I decide to try my own patch and now I am using it for my actual work. My patch allows the Webissue
- Give a member the access to project according to one of the five levels: readonly, commentonly, editonly, regular (be able to create issue), and admin
- Give a folder two further restrictions. View: member can see all issues or only involved (created, assigned) issues, Edit: if member (once they have enough project access right) can create issue, or only edit issue, or only comment on issue. So I can restrict my announcement folder in public project readonly, or commentonly
- Lock a particular issue so no one (except PM) can change it regardless their right and folder permission. There are two level of lock: make it readonly, or still allow people give comment on it but not change attribute
- Lock some attribute so only PM can edit it
- Hide some attribute so only PM can see it (they are also locked automatically so only PM can edit). Also for this purpose, PM can mark a particular comment as private so this comment is hidden from user (only PM can do this, user cannot have private comment)
- Enter extra information for each user

These things come with a BIG PRICE: The desktop client collapses. I have to disable it and use web client only.

That is my story about how I use Webissue in my work. Sorry for my bad English.

Quan

This post relates to the other post webissues.mimec.org/node/718 when I did my first try with the patch

Apart from the two area mentioned above, we are considering implement Webissue as a complain monitoring system, so student can file their complain, this will be handled by an assigned officer, and the whole process will be monitored by a controller. But we are a bit hesitated since we have about 100K students and we do not know if this system can work with that large number of users and issues