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Feature request #1198: Automatically record issue metadata changes in comments

Kind feature request
Product wincent.dev
When Created , updated
Status closed
Reporter Greg Hurrell
Tags no tags

Description

It would be nice if on editing the summary of an issue from "foo" to "bar" a comment could be automatically added which said something like: 

Changed summary from:
  foo
To:
  bar

Likewise, for tags, the "kind" field, the "product" field, and even the "public" field.

Comments

  1. Greg Hurrell

    So where would be the right place to handle this? There are three places where we can change "metadata" on an issue (not really "metadata" but just attributes):

    1. Using the issues#edit form.
    2. Using AJAX in-place editors in issues#show.
    3. Programmatically (eg. from the script/console).

    If we decide that we only want to annotate edits done from a web browser then the right place to do it would be in the issues controller. If we decide we ant to annotate all edits, including programmatic ones, then the right place would be in the issues model itself.

    At this stage I really don't know what level would be appropriate, although I am leaning towards the first two levels only (1 and 2).

    Regardless of the decision I make, need to decide who will "own" these comments. If they have no owner they will appear as coming from "anonymous", which is probably not what I want. Ideally they would be tagged as coming from "system"; perhaps they would have an entirely different appearance. Perhaps they shouldn't even be comments at all, but a new model called "annotations"; which would be another database query, and I'd have to decide whether they would be displayed interleaved with the comments or separately (as they are in Bugzilla, I think).

  2. Greg Hurrell

    For an example of what Bugzilla does, go to this bug and click the "history" link next to the "Modified" header.

  3. Greg Hurrell

    For comparison, take a look at this Trac ticket. You can see how changes appear as comments, owned by the person who made the change.

  4. Greg Hurrell

    Ok, I think I'm going to do this like Trac does, and I'm going to do it at the controller level, because only the controller knows who is doing the edit. The model can't and shouldn't know that.

  5. Greg Hurrell

    Ok, looks like I've got it all implemented. But the changes are relatively complicated so will subject them to a bit of testing before deploying.

  6. Greg Hurrell

    Ok, so I've been testing this for a while in the staging environment and it seems to work well. It's now live on the production server as well.

  7. Greg Hurrell

    Status changed:

    • From: Open
    • To: Closed
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