Bugzilla – Full Text Bug Listing
| Summary: | provide web forum based issue provider | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | z_Archived | Reporter: | Erkki Lindpere <villane> |
| Component: | Mylyn | Assignee: | Mik Kersten <mik.kersten> |
| Status: | RESOLVED FIXED | QA Contact: | |
| Severity: | enhancement | ||
| Priority: | P4 | CC: | ekuleshov, remy.suen |
| Version: | unspecified | Keywords: | helpwanted |
| Target Milestone: | --- | ||
| Hardware: | All | ||
| OS: | All | ||
| Whiteboard: | |||
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Description
Erkki Lindpere
The way to do this would be to start out by mimicking the way that Bugzilla queries work. You'll notice that the task list has an org.eclipse.mylar.tasklist.providers extension point that requires externalizer and handler classes for dealing with saving state and task actions. I hope that these extension points and APIs will get simplified some, and any progress on that will be posted on bug 102848. Erkki, are you still intersted in this? We could make it a connector that people vote for (see bottom of http://www.eclipse.org/mylar/start.php) but I think it would probably need to target a specific forum. I am still interested, but the forum client project hasn't been in very active developement due to various issues. I do want to pick it up again, though. If I'd have to choose a particular forum, I think I'd go with phpBB 2 since it's open source and quite popular, and my implementation for the generic client is more complete than the vBulletin one. Maybe I'll start messing with this in the coming weekend... Just letting you know I already started working on the phpBB connector (I've been getting somewhat bored lately and didn't immediately remember that I had this thing planned so Mik's reminder had excellent timing :)). Already a repository can be added and the connection settings validated. I have some questions regarding how to best implement this for Mylar: My phpBB client implementation uses Jakarta Commons HttpClient (3.0) instead of the java.net classes. Would this be ok if the provider would eventually be included in Mylar? It currently also uses Log4J, I haven't looked into how to best do logging in Eclipse/OSGi yet. HttpClient also requires Commons Codec and Commons Logging. Commons Logging and Log4J are provided by the Callisto update site as of RC3, so that leaves HttpClient and Codec, which I currently provide as custom osgi bundles. Should I base the phpBB connector solely on the Bugzilla connector or should I also look into the Jira one? The HttpClient and Commons dependencies are fine. It would be best not to use Log4J but instead to use the MylarStatusHandler class. You should not be depending on mylar.bugzilla, just on mylar.tasklist, and it's best to use mylar.jira as an example. We'll be providing common editing (bug138043) and offline storage facilities (bug 143260) soon which will also result in some refactoring, so it's best to stay away from those features for now. Keep me posted on how it goes! Btw, what user communities would make use of the phpBB connector? (In reply to comment #5) > The HttpClient and Commons dependencies are fine. It would be best not to use > Log4J but instead to use the MylarStatusHandler class. Ok, but if I plan to use the same library outside of Mylar without rewriting it, maybe I could keep using Log4J and write a MylarStatusHandlerAppender for it? > Keep me posted on how it goes! Btw, what user communities would make use of > the phpBB connector? To be honest, I don't really know of any potential immediate users. I didn't really even think about this till now... I had a vague idea myself about using it myself privately in a project that I plan to open source later. I've now made it possible to create queries by selecting a forum (similar to selecting the predefined filters for a Jira query). Maybe tomorrow or on the weekend I'll implement getting threads from a forum as issues. But this is just a prototype -- beyond that, I think this need some analysis to determine what kind of objects to treat as issues. Also, I'll try to get this into some public SCM server once I have something usable. Queries now give hits -- threads from the page 1 of the forum. The externalizer also now supports PHPBB queries & hits. Next I'll try to add support for adding new & existing tasks, refactor some things and try to get the source code to a public CVS server. Sounds good Erkki, and if you end up using it yourself I'm sure more users will join you :) Also, it will be useful for us to see how the UI works for this sort of provider. If you assign me commit rights on the project that you create I can offer to keep the plug-in update as we refactor. Of the hosting choices (SourceForge, Tigris, java.net, and CodeHaus) my choice would probably be Tigris.org because they provide Subversion and allow you to link to another issue tracker. I created a project at tigris.org: http://bbapi.tigris.org/. I'll get the code in there in a couple of days. Erkki, I've CC'd Eugene since he has been doing some work on HTML-based access to vBulletin. Here are the regexps for web repository provider from mylar sandbox plugin: phpbb: <a href="viewtopic.php\?t=(.+?)" class="topictitle">(.+?)</a> vBullettin: <a href=\"showthread.php\?.+?t=(\d+?)" id="thread_title_\1">(.+?)</a> I'm not aware of the mylar sandbox plugin, but I'll take a look at it this week hopefully (I'm not able to spend very much time on this, sadly). The phpBB and vBulletin BBAPI implementations are now in SVN (The patterns used are mostly in the org.tigris.bbapi.vbulletin.VBParser and org.tigris.bbapi.phpbb.PHPBBParser classes ). Note that these implementations are not complete. But I do have some old code that has more functions implementated but had a different API - I need to copy, paste & refactor that code. I'll soon import the Mylar provider I was working on into SVN as well. Ok, I took an initial look at the sandbox plugin (mostly the UI, and some of the code). That seems like a great way to do it, and my idea of writing a provider using BBAPI is much more complicated. I haven't taken a look at how the templates were implemented yet... Would you somehow be able to add automatic login implementation with each template? The BBAPI providers for phpBB and vBulletin use HttpClient's Cookies mechanism for login (and also parse the cookies for the user id). With the BBAPI, various features could be added later: like an editor that displays comments, attachements etc. But I'm willing to drop that idea for the moment and use the generic web provider (if it supported automatic login) Also, I'm planning to refactor the BBAPI and introduce ECF as dependency. If I do that, the provider would then depend on ECF. (In reply to comment #14) > Ok, I took an initial look at the sandbox plugin (mostly the UI, and some of > the code). That seems like a great way to do it, and my idea of writing a > provider using BBAPI is much more complicated. > > I haven't taken a look at how the templates were implemented yet... Would you > somehow be able to add automatic login implementation with each template? The > BBAPI providers for phpBB and vBulletin use HttpClient's Cookies mechanism for > login (and also parse the cookies for the user id). Currently there is no support for logging in. If you have more specific details how this should be handled, please open separate report for web connector (at the moment you can use Mylar/Core module) I'm sad to say that I'm no longer very interested in doing this connector. Firstly, I don't really have the time right now. Secondly, the generic web provider can already handle some forums. Thirdly, I think there is a lot more benefit in creating connectors for actual issue trackers rather than making a forum into an issue tracker. If I have some time next year, or the one after that, I might take this up again if noone else does and if I'm still interested. Those points make sErkki, thanks for keeping us posted. I'll mark this for later so that we can revisit any forum-specific needs that the web connector does not handle post 1.0. Right now we're all fully focused on supporting issue trackers, but post 1.0 we'll be able to step back and consider the broader set of items that might make sense to have in the Task List. Reopening to mark as resolved as per message from webmaster: http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/eclipse.org-committers/msg00778.html. Marking resolved. |