BUGtrack Blog

Images as part of description field

Today we’ve implemented perhaps most wanted idea since 2008 – we now allow placing images right inside issue description text (assuming it is edited in HTML format).

You can either drag file from your local disk and drop it into the text, you can copy the file from your local disk and paste it into the text or you can take a screenshot or copy a selection from image processing program and paste it into the text – the operations supported are determined by the APIs provided by your browser. Below is the summary table for supported browsers and operations, each cell specifies minimal required browser version.

	drop file	paste image	paste file
Internet Explorer	10	11	-
Chrome	13	13	-
Firefox	4	4	22
Safari	6	6	-
Opera	15	15	-

 

Export to Excel and unified search field

Today, we’ve added an option to export list results into XLSX (Excel 2007+), CSV and HTML formats.

Clicking on a down arrow to the right of Export’s button label brings the menu to choose desired export format. Clicking on a button’s text performs one-click export to XLSX format

Also, summer release introduced small search boxes at many grid headers in the admin part. These boxes were intended to quickly filter grid contents to rows containing the text you type. While this functionality is quite useful, some pages had many search boxes – one “main” search box on top and one per each grid on a page. With this release we decided to remove grid specific boxes and merge their functionality into main search box.

While in admin area, simply start typing into main search box (without pressing enter key). After a short delay all grids on a page will start displaying filtered results.

Enjoy.

More custom fields and more types

Today, we’ve increased the number of custom fields to 32 and added two more custom field types – E-Mail and URL.

E-Mail and URL field types derive from Text field but add format validation and decorate values as links:

We are planning to add Date and Numeric field types with upcoming filter update.

BUGtrack 3.73 improvements

New BUGtrack features following improvements:

Font Icons:

In many places we’ve replaced 20x20 images with scalable font icons – the site should scale much better on retina devices.

Stat page layout

Closed/open issues ratio is now represented as a bar with raw numbers as well as with percentage. Clicking the part of the bar will lead to a filtered list of closed/open issues.

Also, stat page now uses standard tables with scrollable headers.

Quick Search

Many pages in admin area now feature Quick Search box – when you start typing there the table the box belongs to will display only the rows that contain typed text.

 

Enjoy!

BUGtrack v4 will discontinue IE6 support

Today we are announcing the sunset of IE6 support. BUGtrack v3.72 and subsequent minor releases will still support IE6, yet with the release of BUGtrack v4 we are planning sometime in the summer of 2013 we’ll remove support for IE6 completely. Windows XP users can either upgrade to IE7+ or choose browsers from other vendors.

At the moment IE6 users are presented with a banner prompting them to upgrade.

 

What led us to this decision is in fact the lack of IE6 support from Microsoft side. For a long time they provided “time-bombed” virtual machine images of XP+IE6 we’ve used in our testing environment. Old images have expired in February 2013 and no new images for IE6 were made available since then.

No surprise, mainstream support for Windows XP IE6 was bundled to has ended on April, 14, 2009. XP users have available upgrade path to IE8 - latter is even marked as High Priority (Critical) upgrade.

In addition, some third-party libraries we are using, like jQuery UI dropped support for IE6 in their recent releases.

The web is evolving. IE6 was released in 2001 and by that time was perhaps the best browser in class. Many things were changed since that. As a result we are developing for standards and then patching, adding extras we would not normally need, and spending time to fight with bugs in the browser that is more than a decade old.

Since the last year BUGtrack IE6 users’ share have dropped from a significant 8% to a mere 1%. At this situation we think we should no longer to put our efforts and resources to support outdated, buggy, non-standard-compliant browser. Help the web, upgrade today.

BUGtrack 3.72 list improvements

There been long time since the last BUGtrack update. The release went through a rough patch but thanks to your reports we were able to identify and fix most of the problem within a day. We would like to thank you for your patience and your support.

So, what’s in?

Customizable Lists

You can now select columns to display and list format (Brief/Complete) right from the list page. These settings are remembered for Favorite/My Stuff and each saved filter. Moreover these settings are device specific – you may want to display issues as a list with all columns on 24” wide screen monitor and choose less columns or complete format on your smartphone.

As a bonus – one click Export button was added to a list page as well.

Scrolling Headers

The screenshot speaks for itself - we now always keep table header on screen; long tables become much easier to read.

Brand-new text editor

We’ve swapped our home-brew HTML editor with industrial-strength TinyMCE editor. At the moment new editor’s features set up to be in par with old one but TinyMCE is indeed capable for more. We would suggest checking their demo – if you find some features useful feel free to add the request to Idea Exchange.

No more popup windows

Historically the color picker and calendars were rendered as popup windows. This approach servers us well since the Netscape times, but now it’s an age of tablets and new windows are often opened full screen. Calendars do not require a lot of space and popup windows were replaced with compact dropdowns.

HTML5 ready

HTML5 standard provides many new features, one of these is form validation. When running in HTML5 capable browser such as Firefox, Chrome or IE10 BUGtrack now utilizes standard form validation – if we can check for some common errors right in the browser there is no need to send invalid data to the server.

Less clicks

Quite simple change – when search field is focused, the dropdown with search options automatically opens.

Behind the scenes

While filter settings used in Filters/Reports/Web-Queries look the same, in fact these are three separate code paths. We are working on to unify filtering UI to prepare for further improvements.

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.