Conditional fields in tickets

[johan.regnell@…]

Not necessarily all possible fields should be presented to the user. There could be preconditions attached to fields, for checking if they're applicable at all and for checking if the current user can actually set/modify them.

Then, as an advanced case, instead of being an all or nothing situation, the possible content of one field could be dependent on the ticket state: see #1299, #2752 and #comment:13.

Use cases

Ability to have different ticket fields for different ticket types

(original one) When using quite different types of tickets (bug-report, requirement, etc), there is a need for different fields depending on the ticket type. This might add just the flexibility required for complying with existing development processes. Great feature in particular when support for master and child tickets is planned, trac could be more of a requirements management system beyond the issue database approach. See also duplicates: #4028, #4643

Abilty to have different ticket fields for different ticket components

As for ticket types, but for components. See #2752

Hide the Keywords: field

See #3281

Hide some fields for new tickets

See #1580. This could be achieved quite simply by putting the ticket id in the condition.

[Christian Boos]

Yes, that was one of the early request concerning the TicketTypes feature. Having more flexibility for the ticket properties would be nice.

There's still the open question of the UI, though: As you have to select the type of a ticket, you don't know beforehand which type specific fields you'd need.

One solution to this would be to have only the "common" fields at ticket creation type, and the "type specific" ones when editing the ticket.

Same problem when changing the ticket type, how to handle the type specific fields? Maybe when the type changes, only take into account the type change itself, possibly some changes for the common fields, and ignore any type specific field change. The type specific fields of the new type will be available for a second round of edit, after the type change has occurred.

[pkou at ua.fm]

First of all, I would propose to allow the "type specific" fields for custom fields only. The suggestion is to show/hide "type specific" fields using JavaScript:

• By default, all fields are shown;
• When the page has loaded, fields for non-default type are hidden;
• When the ticket type is changed, fields for non-selected type are

hidden, fields for the selected type are shown. This would cause layout problems that can be resolved in one of the following ways:

• Apply new layout to the "type specific" fields when they are shown or

hidden;

• Consider "type specific" fields as groups of fields. Layout groups

separately. Show active groups and hide other groups when the ticket type is changed. The approach could work for browsers that do not support JavaScript. I do not think that changing a field that does not belong to currently selected type is an issue.

[Christian Boos]

#4028 marked as duplicate.

I'll soon attach here a patch going in that direction.

[anonymous]

#4643 marked as duplicate.

[anonymous]

I want to listen in on this..

[Christian Boos]

I just closed #2752 as duplicate. That ticket was not about the type field, but about the component, but I think a generic solution could be worked out (see last comment on that ticket).

[Christian Boos]

#1299 would be an other use case, slightly extended: instead of an all or nothing approach (the field is present or missing), its content could depend on other fields (in this case, the list of available components would depend on the selected milestone).

[sam@…]

I'm keen to get this feature implemented, and I'm starting to learn enough about Trac and Python to get it implemented. I'm keen to get feedback on this to increase the chance of a patch being accepted into the trunk.

Some requirements:

• The ability to filter out fields based on ticket data: component, milestone, ticket type, component.
• The ability filter out fields based on user permissions.
• The ability to filter out standard, as well as custom, fields. For some tickets you don't want a description field, just the 1-line summary.

Configuration file:

• Add [ticket-standard] as a complement to [ticket-custom], for manipulating built-in ticket fields.
• (field-name).conditions will set up conditional restrictions
  • (field-name).conditions.(conditional-field) can be a | separated list in one of two formats
  • A|B|C - means only show this field when conditional-field is set to A, B or C
  • !A|B|C - means only show this field when conditional-field is not set to A, B or C
• (field-name).conditions.permission operates similarly on the permissions that the current user has.

Example configuration:

[ticket-standard]
description.conditions.type = !storycard
owner.condition.permission = TICKET_FULLACCESS

[ticket-custom]
installation = select
installation.label = Select the affected installation
installation.condition.component = Frontend|Webservice
installation.condition.milestone = !alpha1|alpha2

Suggested implementation:

• Whenever the ticket-details form is displayed, use the current, default, and get/post data to determine which fields to show.
• Work out which fields are going to be linked to conditions. In the case above, this will be type, component, and milestone.
• Add an onchange javascript-refresh that reloads the page, with all current field values loaded into the querystring.
• Using ajax would be an optional enhancement

[Christian Boos]

Make it clearer that this ticket is also for conditional content of the fields.

[anonymous]

I have a real interest in this type of system being implemented. I am new to Trac so still a little unfamiliar with how the example shown would work. I just thought I would throw in how I would like this type of system to work with a real example.

Our company is a design house that builds the product from start to finish mouldings, electronics, hardware etc. Using the Trac system I brake down each of these items into components. The current missing part for Trac is that each of these components have differing version numbers.

This approach would fit our scenario perfectly.

I look forward to seeing this as a release some time

[anonymous]

This would be extremely helpful! Has any work been done on it?

[Noah Kantrowitz]

CondFields on trac-hacks implements this mostly.

[anonymous]

Anyone knows how CondFields works/will work with 0.11?

[anonymous]

Replying to nkantrowitz:

CondFields on trac-hacks implements this mostly.

​http://trac-hacks.swapoff.org/wiki/CondFieldsPlugin

[dartar]

+1 for this feature, we'd need custom fields dependent on ticket type.

The CondFields plugin page is down at the moment.

[Christian Boos]

#6661 was closed as duplicate.

[marcus@…]

+1 for this, would be very useful! (or the simple version +1580)

[Ryan Witt <ryan@…>]

+1, but maybe I will take a crack at porting ​http://trac-hacks.swapoff.org/wiki/CondFieldsPlugin to 0.11 for the time being!

[Christian Boos]

Milestone 1.0 deleted

[Remy Blank]

#9289 was closed as a duplicate.

[Mitar]

There is another use case. We would like to add contact data for our users/customers which should be seen only for users with right permissions. All other things should be left public. So we would like to have a field which is only visible/editable to those users with a permission.

[Mitar]

And of course it should be made secure. Not just hiding it with JavaScript but hiding it everywhere (ticket view, RSS, alternative views, ticket notifications, ticket queries, ticket search…).

[Arthaey <arthaey@…>]

CondFieldsPlugin is available here instead of swapoff.org: ​http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/CondFieldsPlugin

[Christian Boos]

#9475 was closed as duplicate.

[anonymous]

I can't believe this still isn't a feature.

[Christian Boos]

#10320 was closed as duplicate of this one. It requested a feature along the same lines as #Hidesomefieldsfornewtickets, with the possibility to "reveal" the hidden fields if one really wanted to set them. It also suggests the use of a plugin for achieving this.

[fbrettschneider@…]

#10320 also suggested grouping ticket fields in colapsable boxes, was closed as duplicate, and was implemented by ​wiki:GroupTicketFieldsPlugin in the meanwhile.

[sam.halliday@…]

+1

[anonymous]

I have 5 ticket types differing only a little bit from the standard ticket form. But one ticket type would be a very huge one defining about 100 new custom fields for its own purpose.

Does it make sense to use ​TH:CondFieldsPlugin in this case? I understand it as if it just *hides* the fields for certain ticket types, but actually every ticket would contain all of the custom ticket fields. But, in our case, I don't want to bloat the whole ticket db only because of that single type.

[Ryan J Ollos <ryan.j.ollos@…>]

Replying to anonymous:

Does it make sense to use ​TH:CondFieldsPlugin in this case?

You may want to look at ​th:CondFieldsGenshiPlugin. However, please ask any further questions on the MailingList.

[ralph@…]

Any updates on this? I'm also looking to implement different custom fields for different ticket types like the OP.

[figaro]

This is not scheduled to be part of Trac core. However, will either ​th:DynamicFieldsPlugin or ​th:CondFieldsGenshiPlugin help you?

Also, please ask any further questions on the MailingList.

[sergiokessler@…]

just for the posterity (and google users), an easy way to hide things in Trac is to use a customized css.

See https://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracInterfaceCustomization

inside style.css put things like:

field-description, label[for="field-description"] {                                                                                                                      
    display: none;                                                                                                                                                        
}

now, there are many parts in trac that do not have an html ID, so some things are more difficult to hide…