Support for states and sub-states in ticket workflow

[stephan@…]

In our project, we're using an elaborate ticket workflow with more than a dozen states. Some of them can be considered sub-states of a more general state, e.g.

• new
• …
• assigned
• …
• resolved
  • checked into subversion
  • installed on a test environment
  • confirmed by test team
  • installed on a production environment
  • confirmed by ticket reporter
• closed

While the workflow needs to go strictly from one stage to the next, it would be nice to regard all the "resolved" sub-states as one in ticket reports and ticket queries.

This request could be supported in one of two ways:

• Either a status name can be structured, e.g. "resolved/checked_in" and the custom query offers "resolved" as one checkbox for all variants.

• Or the ticket workflow considers additional requirements that must be fulfilled for a status change to be applicable.
  • The sub-states are stored in another (custom) field, similar to "resolution".
  • The custom field's value is tested to see if an action is applicable.
  • An operation may modify the custom field.

[mala]

I agree,

We would like new states like "ready for test" / "tested and released".

However creating custom attributes will be a nice feature.

[Eli Carter]

I think this is beyond the scope of what Trac core should cover.

However, you can completely replace the ConfigurableTicketWorkflow with your own ITicketActionController with a plugin. Instead of:

[ticket]
workflow=ConfigurableTicketWorkflow

write a plugin to implement what you want, say NestableTicketWorkflow, and change your configuration to:

[ticket]
workflow=NestableTicketWorkflow

You can even subclass ConfigurableTicketWorkflow to get started.

And of course, post it to ​http://trac-hacks.org for fame and fortune. ;)