BUGtrack Blog

Screenshots made easy

We are glad to announce Bug Shooting now supports output to BUGtrack.

With Bug Shooting, creating screen captures and sending them to various bug tracking and issue management systems, e-mail, image editing and instant messaging applications is done in a breeze.

BUGtrack 3.71: Favorites, keyboard shortcuts

How often do you encounter the situation when the record is not assigned directly to you, e.g. is not displayed on My Stuff page, but you are still interested in tracking the conversation? As it's not an easy task finding those records with this BUGtrack release we are introducing "Favorite" concepts.

It's quite easy to learn: all lists and record pages display the star icon near the title. Clicking on the star turns it yellow – the record is now marked as your favorite. There is also new "star" tab to display your favorite records.

Sort options were also extended with Favorite options to allow displaying favorite records on top.

Yet another addition for this version are keyboard shortcuts to tabs.

As you can see on the screenshot, certain letters are underlined. Pressing the modifier key and the letter will move keyboard focus to the tab. As this is new feature, for now you'll need to confirm your selection by pressing Enter key to avoid accidental navigation away from the page. Later we'll extend this to perform navigation without confirmation.

The modifier key mentioned above varies from browser to browser and from platform to platform. Generally it's an Alt key for IE, Safari and Chrome, and Alt+Shift combination for Firefox on Windows. Mac versions of Safari and Chrome use Ctrl+Option combination and Firefox uses Ctrl key as the modifier key.

BUGtrack 3.70: lean and mean

In this release we've redesigned and simplified tab area of BUGtrack.

Prefs tabs is now gone. To change personal preferences, click on your name in a top-right menu, it now serves as a link to preferences page.

Maximum size of custom Logo has been increased to 200x100. If you upload larger images, BUGtrack will resize it to fit to 200x100 box preserving image proportions

Search tab and Go to# box are now combined into single search box. Will you type digits, BUGtrack will navigate to an record by number. Will you type some letters, BUGtrack will search records containing the text specified.

Text search logic is also changed. Instead of specifying how to interpret text (All Words, Any Word, Exact Phrase), you can now write queries in a simple yet effective language. Remaining options: whether to search closed bugs and maximum number of records to display are available from drop-down menu

Text query language supports following constructs:

Query Example	Description
feature	Searches for inflectional forms of the word feature.
feature failure feature AND failure	Searches for inflectional forms of the words feature and failure. Keyword AND is optional. This is identical to former All Words option.
feature OR failure	Searches for inflectional forms of the words feature or failure. You can use either pipe symbol or OR keyword. This is identical to former Any Word option.
"feature failure"	Searches for exact phrase.
feature -failure	Searches for issues containing word feature but NOT the word failure
+feature	Exact word: searches for word feature without generating inflectional forms.
feat*	Prefix search: searches for words that starts with feat
<feature failure>	Searches for the word failure in close proximity to the word feature.

Notes:

• If you want to search for string of digits, prefix your text with double quote to avoid resolving text as record number.
• You can use & (ampersand) symbol instead of AND keyword and | (pipe) symbol instead of OR keyword.
• AND operator takes precedence over OR in queries. You can change the precedence using parentheses. For example:
  
  feature failure OR issue
  
  is evaluated as
  
  (feature AND failure) OR issue
  
  You can change the order of evaluation so that OR evaluated first:
  
  feature (failure OR issue)
  
• Certain combinations are not allowed. For example you can not write the query consisting solely of NOT constructs or containing OR NOT combinations or use prefix search or exact word search in proximity brackets. As we designed search process to be unobtrusive, such invalid constructs are silently ignored.

BUGtrack 3.69: Administrative edit

For a long time there was a discussion on whether to allow users to edit the comments after the post. Some people think that tampering with the comments is not a good idea, others think that such a feature is needed because users sometimes post sensitive information that should not be in the database.

We decided to compile the best from both worlds.

Now administrators are allowed to edit the comments, delete and upload files. If you are BUGtrack administrator, you'll see an "edit" icon in a comment header.

Clicking on that icon invokes administrative edit interface that should look familiar to BUGtrack users.

The only new element here is File(s) section which displays the list of files currently attached to a comment. Clicking on "Delete" icon will mark the file for removal from the database. Also, you can attach new files via familiar Upload file(s) control. Please note that there is no way to update the file – you should remove an old version and upload the new one, though you can do it in one step – the old file will be removed first and the new version will be uploaded.

After the changes are committed, revisions authors will be listed in the comments header. You can browse to any comment's version by clicking on numbers, let's say to revision 4

       

or to revision 5

       

or compare differences between adjacent revisions by clicking >> between revisions

       

"Diff" mode also displays the user and the timestamp of the change.

Non-admin users won't see an edit icon and will be always presented with the final version of the comment.

BUGtrack 3.68: couple of new features

Summer is ended, vacations are over, servers are upgraded and moved to a new collocation facility and now it's time to turn to BUGtrack improvements.

The primary goal of this release is the migration to .NET 4.0. Yet it delivers a couple of new features.

• BUGtrack stores the timestamp and the user who opened the issue in Opened/Open By pair of fields. However, when the issue is closed and then reopened, these fields are overwritten with new values. With this release we are introducing Created and Created By fields – their purpose is to store original timestamp and issue creator; they are not affected by reopen action. Both fields are available for web-queries and XSL reports, moreover you can filter and sort by Created field.
• Sort options are now extended with Recently Modified option which puts recently modified bugs on top of the list
• BUGtrack now properly detects iPads and iPods and reverts to plain-text mode editing as mobile Safari does not support rich-text editing yet.

BUGtrack 3.67: even more improvements

Couple more improvements in addition to what we have done in 3.66

The visibility of classifiers (priorities, types, categories and phases) can now be managed from both sides. You were able to select which classifiers are visible for a selected project, and now you can select projects that a particular classifier is visible for – lists of classifiers are now extended with "Projects" icon. Also, all visibility lists are extended with the checkmark to designate the classifier selected as a project default. When adding new classifier BUGtrack prompts to select projects it should be visible.

You can now obtain an uplink (the issue that current issue is linked to) via Web Queries, XSL Reports and Export functions.

MOVED operation now lists old project/area. The list of changes now displays old and new value as well.

My Stuff is also a bit smarter now. If grouped by project first, and particular project is selected in the dropdown on top of the page, My Stuff now uses second-level sort to group issues.

BUGtrack 3.66 has lot of improvements

In this release we've made a lot of improvements.

• Instead of being numbered globally through all the licenses, issues are now numbered sequentially for each license. Тhe introduction issue for new license will be filed as #1. Since there are lot of external references (e-mail notifications, bookmarks, reports, backups,) existing issues' numbers are left intact. But if you had last issue filed as #799999, a new one will be assigned #800000 (globally numbered it would have #818332)
• Projects can now be copied. "Copy project" function makes a copy of the project information, its areas and project-specific versions as well as all users' roles – the Copy icon is to the left of Edit.
• Users can be "copied" too. This function adds new users, assigning them the rights prototype user has.
• Pages controlling project-specific visibility of Priorities, Types, Categories and Phases now have select all/clear all checkbox in the table header.
• Login history page introduces quick filters by user, login type and status. Filters also apply to exported file.
• Mass Mail page is styled like other user-related pages.

BUGtrack 3.64 allows customizing resolution status list

This release targets the unification of internal handling of filters, reports and web queries. Yet, there is one new feature and a lot of cosmetic changes.

BUGtrack Professional Edition now allows customization of the resolution status list. New status can be added, existing ones can be renamed, reordered or removed.

Then, we revisited title editing again. When opening new issue, title is now placed inside of the entry form, unifying user interface, and the focus goes to the title input box. Also, error reporting becomes more consistent this way.

Next, there is no need to edit bug to change the title – it is now editable in place. Title block now issues edit icon which brings up an editor in-place; of course you have to have edit permissions. Changes are saved immediately, when you click on the Save icon or press Enter key. And you may cancel the editing by clicking Undo icon or pressing Escape key.

We've improved the way attachments with long file names are displayed in the conversation thread. The filename is now cut to two lines, to see the file name in full, hover the mouse cursor over the file's icon or thumbnail.

Estimates are now accept the values with the precision up to minute. The input boxes are accepting a old formats as well as new ones, such as

1.5d	one day, four hours (assuming eight hours working day)
1d 4.2h	one day, four hours and 12 minutes
1d 4h 12m	one day, four hours and 12 minutes
4h 12m	four hours and 12 minutes
4:12	four hours and 12 minutes
12m	12 minutes
:12	12 minutes

If the string you enter contains minutes, no fractional parts of hours and days are allowed. On output, BUGtrack tries to present the value with fractional parts of hours when possible – 1:30 will be displayed as 1.5 hrs, while 1:20 will be displayed as 1 hr 20 mins.

Please note that the number reported through the web query XML in the estimate's value attribute is now also reported in minutes, comparing to tenth of hours old version reports – in other words, to get the value in old format you should divide new value by 6. If you ever rely on this, please update your code or XSL transformations.

BUGtrack 3.63 replaces chart engine, colors notes

Chart engine is replaced with a new one, we use in TeamDesk. It adds tick marks along the axes as well as displays values right on the chart drawn. While no new chart types were added in this release, the new engine is far more capable than the old one – check back for a news.

As a bonus addition, notes are now highlighted in yellow color.

BUGtrack 3.62 upgrades bug editing facility

BUGtrack now performs strict validation of user's input, especially for title, due dates and estimates.

While not many features were added in this release, this upgrade will allow us to add more validation messages in the future.

For example we can prompt the user to review her changes if the bug was modified by another user while she was editing.