Code Collaborator Feedback

Problems (verified in v4.0.805 or newer)

• User registration does not work
• Under the "Compare" menu in the diff viewer, it says "1st Upload..." several times.. never "2nd",etc.
• Why does Preview in admin/archive require entering an archive path? Also the response for preview ("..would result in...") is hard to notice when the page refreshes. It looks like nothing happened unless you read the text closely.
• 'ccollab set' (or running other ccollab cmds before setting password) shows password

should stty -echo here so the entered password is not visible

Problems (before v4)

• Error when trying to addchanges for SVN moved file. Same error when trying to addchanges for a new file for a filename that has been svn deleted in another changelist.

SCM communication error: Path does not exist on the Subversion server: ...

See: http://tools.gallery2.org/pastebin/1335

Note: addchanges exluding that specific file worked.

• 'ccollab addsvndiffs' problems

With svn 1.3.2 I got an error about --ignore-eol-style parameter.. this was added in svn 1.4.

With svn 1.4 it worked, but all the unchanged lines show "*** unspecified line placeholder ***". I see this mentioned in the ccollab documentation.. is this really expected behavior and we're supposed to use parameters for svn diff to include more context?

• Version content already set message

Tried using the latest Eclipse Plugin. It worked fine for creating a new review and reuploading most modified files after the first review. Had problems with a file that had been updated in SVN between my first upload and the second upload. Receive the message "Could not finish Review Job, Version content already set.". Had to use command line and it worked fine.

• Opera not fully supported (tested with 9.10)

Adding comments impossible due to the following message that is always displayed: "Error: Invalid input: Comment: must be at least 1 characters; you supplied 0."

Mark Read on specific comments has no effect.

• "You have unread comments above (marked [red flag])" but there are no unread comments. Thus the review can't be closed.

Even in the "Do Not Roll Up" view there are no markers for unread comments.

• Unable to mark a comment as read. Thus the review can't be closed.

Even after repeatedly opening the diff view again, it would ignore clicks on the "Mark Read" button.

Wishlist

• A "Finished this Pass" button.

Purpose: It would be nice to have a button that as a single reviewer, I could press that would "close" my involvement until the author responds. If I leave the review open, I don't seemed to get notifications of changes to the review. The only way to do this is create a trivial defect and then close the review. It would nice if you didn't have to create the defect in order to lock the review open. --Talmdal 22:14 November 2007 (PST)

• Keyboard navigation of files and diffs within files.

Purpose: speeds up navigation of large changes

When I'm looking at a file diff, I want to have keystrokes to switch between files (next/prev) and keystrokes to go from one change to the next. This makes navigation much faster.

• Integrate editor with command line client

Command line is status quo for many unix hackers.

v1.2 of ccolab addchanges says:

Loading Review #1 from the server...

Opening text editor for modifying file list...

Loading Subversion data for selected files...

To edit the list of files to upload, edit the temporary file

/var/tmp/file-list9144.txt

and press Enter when finished.

You may need to press Ctrl-Z to get back to your terminal now,

followed by 'fg' to resume this process.

If you are running in an environment that supports graphical editors,

you may set the SMARTBEAR_VISUAL_EDITOR environment variable to automatically

open your graphical editor. Sorry, terminal-based editors cannot be spawned

automatically.

Not sure why terminal based editors can't be used here; Subversion brings up Emacs in the terminal for me. It would be really convenient to have it bring up a list of all the possible files and let me remove some from the list (like the way that Perforce lets you manage changelists).

This is a limitation in Java. When an external process is spawned in Java it does not have access to the console. I think this may be fixed in Java 1.6, but at the current time, we can't rely on 1.6 features. --Smart Bear

• View all diffs

Rather than clicking each modified file, it would be nice to view all diffs in a single view.. or at the very least, the diff viewer should have "next file" / "prev file" buttons so you don't have to close that viewer and then click on the next file. --Mindless 10:10, 7 January 2007 (PST)

• Notification via IRC

Would be nice to select notification via our IRC channel instead of email (or in addition to email?). This could also record persistent IRC notes using our gallery-bot.

There's a Collaborator server-side trigger (under 'Triggers' in the Admin menu) that you could use for this. --Smart Bear2

• No particular reviewer

Is there a way to open a review without assigning a particular reviewer? ie, "here are my changes, someone please review it" Would be great to open a review with no reviewer, and have the "home" page for everyone show a report of reviews with no reviewer yet. Since this is an open source project and there can be many contributors -- some less "in the loop" than others, being able to see open reviews on the home page would greatly improve their visibility. --jmullan

• Observed Reviews on Home Page

I was recently associated as an observer on some reviews but couldn't see them until I ran a report. It would have been nice to have had those reviews on my home page so I could see their status at a glance. --jmullan

• "Done" Button for Author

The "Reviewer" role can signal being done with reviewing by pressing on the "Finish" button on the review page.

It would be very useful to give the "Author" role a way to let the reviewer know that one is done with addressing all comments and that the reviewer should go over them again.

Right now, there's some confusion / uncertainty between the parties of a review since the "Author" might still be busy with adding more comments and uploading new / updating review material. Time is wasted unless there is some additional communication. --Valiant 17:08, 14 January 2007 (PST)

• Show the URL after creating a new review

After I do "ccollab addchanges new *" to create a new review, it tells me the number of the new review. It would be nice if it also gave me the url directly to the review (in this case http://reviews.gallery2.org/index.jsp?page=NewReview&reviewid=70) so that I can just click and go. --Bharat 21:17, 29 January 2007 (PST)

• Open new reviews in a tab instead of a new window

New windows are *heavy* in Firefox if you have a lot of extensions. Give the user the option to just open it in the current window, and use the standard anchor fallback method to support ctrl-click then I can open the new file in a tab of the current window -- that'll be much faster. --Bharat 22:56, 29 January 2007 (PST)

When I do addchanges new, it opens the a new tab in my case (Firefox 2). But the URL is wrong, localhost instead of the review server (ccollab 2.0 client). --Valiant 14:37, 30 January 2007 (PST)

Does the server maybe not have its URL set correctly on the Admin menu? --Smart Bear2

• Viewing diffs is very slow

It can take 20+ seconds to download and view a side-by-side diff for a file of just a few hundred lines. --Bharat 22:56, 29 January 2007 (PST)

• Provide a way to see the diffs on the main review page

Having to load up a very large file just to see one or two lines of diff is painful. I'd like to see the diffs inline, and then be able to drill down to the file if I can't figure it out from the context of the diff. Ajax requests make that much easier. Being able to increase the number of context lines on the fly would be a plus. --Bharat 22:56, 29 January 2007 (PST)

Diff viewer in 4.0 can show more context lines on the fly

• Date/timestamp for each comment / defect / action / update

Everything should have a timetamp. I want to know when the new files have been added / updated, I want to know when a comment has been written, etc.

• Multiple discussion threads on the review page

There's only a single discussion thread on the main review page. When there are multiple topics, this makes it very hard to follow the different discussions.

Instead of just "Add comment", there should be a "Start new discussion" button as well. And there would be a "Add comment" link at the bottom of each discussion.

Or make it a threaded discussion. Show a "Add reply" button to each existing comment and display the comments indented to visualize the hierarchy. --Valiant 02:50, 3 February 2007 (PST)

• Multiple discussion threads per code line / global file

Same issue as for the review page. Discussion topics are very hard to discuss when there's just a single comment list of comments in one block. --Valiant 02:50, 3 February 2007 (PST)

• Connect review to a commit

Hard to tell now if a completed review actually got committed.

• Mark all comments in an entire review as read

Sometimes you get assigned to a review and it goes through multiple rounds before you get a chance to look at it. I review the current code, but there are lots of comments in older that are no longer relevant. I don't want to remove those changes from the review, but I also don't want to go back through every single one of them and click the "mark read" button, since that is very tedious and can take me 10 minutes of clicking and waiting.

Needs Investigation

• Fine grained control over how much mail gets sent to notification list.

We want to restrict it to just emailing on new reviews, not for every state change.

I couldn't find a way to do that in 1.2 (Bharat)

Should be possible with triggers / manual configuration (SmartBear)

• There doesn't appear to be a way of tracking who closed which defect.

True, but it can automatically add a comment to the chat log. (SmartBear)

Completed Items

• Automatical synchronization with the SCM server (cron job to SVN update) à la fisheye.

Purpose: Having live data for all reports, e.g to see what commits have not been reviewed in the "Changes, Unreviewed" report. It seems it only keeps track of changes that have been entered manually into the system instead. --Valiant 18:26, 3 January 2007 (PST)

This is doable by using a subversion trigger to automatically upload the changelist to the Collaborator server. See the manual [here] --Smart Bear2

• Specify base rev preference

When multiple changes have been uploaded to a review it seems that clicking each file initially comes up with the most recent diff. Sometimes this is ok, but more often I want to view the diff from the base rev. Couldn't find any selection on the "roll up changelists" selector that would make this happen, so everytime I click a file I have to then pick the selector to use the base rev.

See 'Default Version Comparison' under User Preferences / Diff Viewer --Smart Bear2

• If I go into Admin / Archive and try to preview or archive data (even using a dir with 777 permissions as the path) I get a blank white screen. From output.log:

2007-11-14 14:28:56,538 ERROR com.smartbear.ccollab.controllers.ControllerServlet - Exception in top-level controller
java.lang.NullPointerException
        at com.smartbear.html.form.InputButton.wasClicked(InputButton.java:46)
        at com.smartbear.ccollab.controllers.AdminArchive.doPageLoad(AdminArchive.java:104)
        at com.smartbear.ccollab.controllers.Controller.setPageContext(Controller.java:399)
        at com.smartbear.ccollab.controllers.Controller.forwardPageContext(Controller.java:598)
        at com.smartbear.ccollab.controllers.Wizard.doPageLoad(Wizard.java:139)
        at com.smartbear.ccollab.controllers.Admin.doPageLoad(Admin.java:61)
        at com.smartbear.ccollab.controllers.Controller.setPageContext(Controller.java:399)
        at com.smartbear.ccollab.controllers.SecureControllerServletBase.processRequest(SecureControllerServletBase.java:31)
        at com.smartbear.ccollab.controllers.ControllerServletBase.service(ControllerServletBase.java:101)
...

Fixed in v4.0 build 806

• If I go into Prefs and try to add a first Review Subscription or File Subscription then I just get a blank white page when I click Create New.

2007-11-01 19:38:21,865 ERROR com.smartbear.ccollab.controllers.ControllerServlet - Exception in top-level controller
java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 0
        at com.smartbear.ccollab.controllers.UserPrefs.doPageLoad(UserPrefs.java:629)
        at com.smartbear.ccollab.controllers.Controller.setPageContext(Controller.java:399)
        at com.smartbear.ccollab.controllers.SecureControllerServletBase.processRequest(SecureControllerServletBase.java:31)
        at com.smartbear.ccollab.controllers.ControllerServletBase.service(ControllerServletBase.java:101)
        at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:803)
...

Fixed in v4.0 build 805

• HTML bug: It shows &nbsp in the review materials section in the Notes column. The HTML code is &nbsp instead of  . - Code Collaborator v4.0.803

Fixed in v4.0 build 805

• Email templates show placeholder strings (eg {1}) instead of actual value.

You havent been working on {1}, which is holding up the completion of the review. Your role of {4} means your approval is required before the review is complete. Please visit {1} as soon as you can.

Fixed in v4.0 build 805

• ccollab_client_2_0_618 problems:

Many commands don't end their output with a newline

ccollab info reports server http://localhost:8080 instead of the value I configured

ccollab query and ccollab report still don't work, as I reported in earlier versions.. however it appears these are no longer supported commands, as the command list and docs don't show them.

Comments not applicable in 4.0 client

• Server becomes unresponsive

Log is full of "Licensing server could not be reached to validate license code." error message

Restart fixes it.

In January, we moved our license server to a new hosting service (new IP address as well). These error messages probably occurred in that time frame and may have been the result of a local DNS cache (in some cases at the application level). --Smart Bear

• Unsaved comments/defects are lost on window focus

When drafting a comment in the inspection/review page and switching Firefox tabs for a while and then returning to the inspection tab to continue to write the comment, the tab refreshes automatically and the drafted comment is lost.

This issue should have been fixed in build 606. I notice that you are currently running 608. Is this still an issue? --Smart Bear

confirmed --Valiant 07:42, 9 March 2007 (PST)

• Unable to reopen closed reviews:

$ ccollab-client/ccollab addchanges 18 patch

Attaching Changes to Review.error: cannot attach changelist

Cannot upload changelists to a completed review.

I tried to attach a revised patch to completed review and got the above error. Apparently it's not possible to reopen closed reviews.

To reopen a review, first just make a comment in the review indicating why you want to reopen the review. This will automatically open the review. Then you may upload additional files. --Smart Bear