Drill-Down Reports

[Denis de Bernardy <ddebernardy@…>]

It would be sweet if, in addition to the automatically added sorts that appear in the custom header, trac added automatic filter links within the cells.

A simplified example to make sense of this. Consider this report:

SELECT
  id AS ticket,
  summary as summary,
  severity
FROM ticket
WHERE status <> 'closed'

I wanted to change it into this:

SELECT
  id AS ticket,
  summary as summary,
  severity
FROM ticket
WHERE status <> 'closed'
  AND CASE
  WHEN $SEVERITY <> ''
  THEN severity = $SEVERITY
  ELSE 1
  END

Two problems:

• trac returns an error when $SEVERITY is not present in the url
• the fields need to be manually entered in the url for it to work

Suggestions:

• on report load, initialize variables named after each column, even if it is not present in the url (this would fix my undefined variable proble)
• in the report itself, add a link to the same report, with that parameter in the url, when no other link would normally apply
• turn the milestone link into a drill-down link

It would then become possible to have:

/report/1

whose severity field, for instance, would link to urls like:

/report/1?SEVERITY=major

and things would be ordered/grouped in whichever way is defined by the report.

Bonus suggestion: create a shorthand syntax, e.g.:

SELECT
  id AS ticket,
  summary as summary,
  severity
FROM ticket
WHERE status <> 'closed'
  AND $_SEVERITY

where $_SEVERITY would expand as described above. the link would then be only added with to the fields whose filters are deemed desired, while the remaining ones would be ignored.

[Remy Blank]

The issues you mention about missing variables have been solved in trunk in #7293. Basically, reports containing variable references now have a form at the top allowing to edit the argument values. Combined with your CASE trick, this already allows implementing drill-down reports, although not "single-click" ready.

Also, the parameter syntax in reports is already complicated as is, so I'm against adding yet another syntax for a shorthand.

I suggest "worksforme".

[Denis de Bernardy <ddebernardy@…>]

super. trouble with closing this as worksforme is there is no means to add html in the form. it's not single-click ready.

the real issue is when you've plenty of tickets around. in my own trac, it's no big deal, as there are never more than two pages of tickets. over at wordpress.org, however, we had well over 1,000 a few weeks ago. the reports are much about useless.

I'd like it to be possible for moderators and committers to use this report:

​https://core.trac.wordpress.org/report/1

In such a way that they can quickly scan through a component, a severity, a workflow state, whatever, in a single click.

Perhaps we could add something like this instead, in the select syntax?

select severity as severity*

[Christian Boos]

I don't think we're ever going that for with TracReports. Those are intended to write very specific, specialized, reports that you can't easily get with the more generic TracQuery (custom queries). There, you can very easily add your own filters so you could quite easily scan through a component, a severity, a workflow state, whatever, in a few clicks ;-)

[Denis]

Open source software projects are just beyond me, on occasion. Why is it that they're so air-tight to usability improvements?

Trac custom queries are hopelessly useless as they are. Consider the report I highlight above, and wonder how I can extract the workflow state using a custom query. You cannot. Custom queries return results in a random order at best, you cannot filter custom queries using a complicated expression.

Drill down on reports would allow to custom-query these specialized reports you mentioned when they're too long, and that would give trac a tremendous boost in usefulness.

Plus, you're closing it as worksforme, but the fact of the matter is it doesn't: You cannot insert html in the report's description to make sub-reports easily available. If that was possible than I'd agree I'd be beating a dead horse and move on. But as things currently are, you cannot.

Merely adding the possibility to add a GET form in the report's description could work…

[Christian Boos]

Well, the worksforme is in agreement with what Remy explained in comment:1. Have you tried his suggestions?

[Denis]

Aye, nevermind, and terribly sorry about the rant. I had completely missed that sentence.