Thursday, October 09, 2008

Some AJAX Items On Bugzilla

I was looking at this page (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bugzilla:UE) and thinking about the improvements I deploy with Bugzilla and how they might be generally useful to all Bugzilla users.

A lot of this is inspired by my obsession with AJAX and jQuery, but more so, with the fact that I have deployed Bugzilla to hundreds, if not thousands, of users in my career and I have always been pleased -- both with the system as a platform and with my ability to customize it.
  • Client-Side Table Sorting -- Many tables today in Bugzilla cannot be sorted and are not Zebra'd
    • Bug List
    • User List
    • Classification / Product / Component Lists
    • Request Queue
    • Flags
    • Custom Fields
  • AJAX Content Hovers
    • These can replace links to "fields.html" and allow the user to get immediate information about products, components, resolutions and status
  • Search-As-You-Type and Revise Search From Search Results with an AJAX 'ctype' 
  • AJAX Hovers for "Defect #" or "Bug #" auto-linking.  Dynamic, beautiful and far more informative AJAX hover could display assignees, current status and (configurable?) information
  • Replace attachment iFrames with jQuery .ajax()

General Stuff I Change
  • Switching "Saved Searches" Into Drop-Down Menus to support large numbers of shared queries
  • Many Additional Bug Entry Templates
  • Customized Index.cgi
    • Include Index of Saved Searches
    • Canned Reports
    • Links To New Defect Forms
  • Add "Clone Defect With Same Product" Link
  • Reverse Blocks/Depends On for Clones
  • Add "Clone Defect To Same Product" Link to All Dependency Tree Bug Tree Nodes
  • Add a Knob "Assign & Accept This Defect Into My Queue"
    • This may be a function of my SVN and CVS hook scripts that require this state for defects to be used for commits.  This feature is probably only as useful as the Assigned/Accepted status is for the user
  • Increase the Whiteboard to a Textarea

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A lot of that is stuff we'd take upstream, some of which we already have bugs for.

The Bugzilla UI team has a leader, Guy Pyrzak--probably a good idea to get in touch with him. You can find his contact info on the Developer Profiles page on bugzilla.org.

-Max