Bugzilla Integration Plugin for Eclipse 3.1

Last Updated: November 16, 2004

Disclaimer

This plug-in is an exploration into bugzilla integration with an end goal of increasing the productivity of Eclipse developers. The priority or deliverability is in no way linked to that of the Platform.

Motivation

Bugzilla is the bug tracking used daily by Eclipse developers in order to report and manage bugs and to coordinate team work. In addition to that, Bugzilla is an important tool for communication and discussions between Eclipse committers and the community. The standard way to interact with Bugzilla is the web interface, which provides easy access to all features and functionality of the tool.

However, we feel that the current way of dealing with Bugzilla over the web interface has certain shortcomings. While the web interface allows access to all the features of Bugzilla, it doesn't provide the integration an Eclipse user is used to from other development tools. In the developer's workflow, interfacing Bugzilla means switching to a web browser and to a different tool, completely separate from Eclipse.

With this plugin, we would like to experiment with new ways to access Bugzilla and to integrate it more tightly in the Eclipse environment. For the time being, our approach for integration is a light-weight one, so we don't have an Eclipse interface for every operation Bugzilla supports. Instead, for now we rely on the web interface to handle common tasks and provide easier access using an Eclipse UI. The web interface is integrated in Eclipse via the SWT browser widget.

Status and Goals

The current release features a new view which can be found in the category "Others -> Bug Systems" in Eclipse. All the operations are available via the context menu of the view. The following features can already be used:

Manage a set of bug tracking systems. Currently Bugzilla is the only bug tracking system we support, but more can be added in the future by other plugins.
Manage bugs in folders for easy organization. Standard operations such as copy, paste and delete are available, as well as support for drag and drop.
Display the information of bugs (properties, comments) in a light-weight way for quick look-up. The label of a bug shows the most important properties such as the priority, status and milestone.
Double-clicking an item in the view opens the SWT browser with the appropriate webpage for the item.
Display a browser History folder with the most recently visited bugs and queries.
Add queries and store them in different folders. Queries can be added via the context menu by pasting the query URL or by dragging a query from the History folder.
Refresh bugs with the latest information from the Bugzilla server and execute queries.

The following features are planned:

Integrate the handling of attachments, do operations on them (applying a patch directly, viewing a screenshot, ...)
Integrate with CVS and other repository providers, hyperlink bug references and display information either in a view or in a browser, add commit comments.
Configure a bug's label.
Sorting bugs according to different criteria.

Screenshot

Try it!

A preview release of the plugin is available on an update site. It currently interfaces with Bugzilla versions 2.16.x.

The following steps explain how to install it:

In Eclipse, open "Help -> Software Updates -> Find and Install" in the menu.
In the dialog, select "Search for new features to install" and click "Next".
Click "New Remote Site" and enter the following URL in the URL field:
http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/platform-vcm-home/updates
Check the newly added entry in the list and hit "Next".
Select the feature on the next page, finish the wizard and restart your workbench.

To get started with the plug-in, do the following:

Open the Other > Bug Systems view which can be found in the Other" category in the view dialog.
Right-click in the view and selection Add > Bug System.
Enter the URL of a bugzilla server or select one from the drop-down list.

The best way to get started is to double-click on the newly added Bugzilla server. This will open the SWT browser in the editor pane of your workbench and display the starting page of the selected Bugzilla system. As you issue queries or display specific bugs, the History folder in the bug systems view gets populated with the visited items.

You can store bug reports and queries by dragging them to the top-level node in the bug systems view. In order to better organize your queries and bug reports, you can also create folders, which behave in a way similar to file system folders. To create a new folder in the top level node, right-click the latter and select Add > Folder. You can also create folders within folders. To move and copy queries and bug reports, either drag them around with your mouse, use the context menu to access standard actions such as Copy, Paste and Move or simply use the standard platform shortcuts for these actions.

The bottom pane of the bug view gives a compact summary of the item selected in the top part. For instance, if a bug report is selected, you see some key data listed such as the bug owner, the priority and status. Further, you can see the description of the bug as entered by the reporter as well as all consecutive comments posted by other persons. You can also browse through the comments by selecting them in the tree view. This quick overview is especially useful if the bug systems view is used as a fast view in the Eclipse workbench.

The queries and bug reports can be updated using the Refresh command from the context menu. This will fetch the latest data from the Bugzilla server and update the UI accordingly. Refreshing a query will re-execute it and display the results as children of the query node.

If you already now the number (id) of a bug you are interested in observing, you can also select Add > Bug Report from the context menu of either a folder or the Bugzilla server to add it. Similarly, a query can be added by selecting Add > Query and pasting the query URL - addmittedly not very convenient. The best way currently to add queries is to browse them with the browser to get them added to the history view and drag them somewhere. The history folder can be cleared using Clear History from its context menu.

We also support named queries to some extent. Named queries are queries stored on the Bugzilla server for a specific user. In order to access them, you have to be logged in with your Bugzilla username and password. In order to log in, you first have to log in into Bugzilla from the SWT browser. Then, clicking on one of your bookmarks in the browser will automatically add it to the history folder. If you haven't been logged in so far, you will be prompted to submit your username and password. The reason for this is that the SWT browser uses the same cookies as your system browser, whereas our plugin cannot access these directly and has to maintain its own store for the login information. You can manage your named queries in the smame way as any other Bugzilla query.

Currently, there is no support to actively change something on the Bugzilla server via the bug systems view. This means that so far, the only way to post comments, file new bug reports or manipulating any other information in Bugzilla is to use the browser.

Please report any bugs you might encounter, suggestions for improvements, and general notes and comments to the Platform > Team component in the Eclipse Bugzilla. Thank you, we hope you find it useful!