trac-NewTicketLikeThisPlugin 0.1

Pluggable framework for 'cloning' Trac tickets according to custom business logic

Description

The NewTicketLikeThisPlugin adds a “Clone” button to existing tickets, which lets you create a new ticket whose fields derive from the original ticket if you have the appropriate permission.

It is based on the tracopt.ticket.clone.ticketclonebutton extension that ships with Trac core. Unlike that extension, the NewTicketLikeThisPlugin defines and consumes a pluggable interface for implementing custom policies to determine the way in which a new ticket is derived from the original. This allows flexible, customized business logic to be provided based on the needs and workflows of your team. Also, the NewTicketLikeThisPlugin allows you to configure the permission required to clone a ticket, whereas the core ticketclonebutton hard-codes the TICKET_ADMIN permission.

Two policies are provided by default, in the newticketlikethis.policies module:

• SimpleTicketCloner mimics the behavior of the core tracopt.ticket.clone.ticketclonebutton extension: all fields from the original ticket are cloned, and the “summary” and “description” fields are modified to denote the ticket that they were cloned from.

• ExcludedFieldsTicketCloner clones all fields from the original ticket with no modifications. It can also ignore certain fields entirely, based on a configuration setting, which will force the new ticket to be generated with the system’s default values (or no values) for the fields that were excluded.

More complex policies might implement custom logic for deriving new ticket values based on the values of the existing ticket’s fields, or use alternate cloning policies based on the ticket’s type.

Configuration

To use the plugin, install it in your Trac environment and enable its components in trac.ini:

[components]
newticketlikethis.* = enabled

By default this will add the “Clone” button to the ticket view, and will use the SimpleTicketCloner component to clone your tickets. The TICKET_ADMIN permission will be required for cloning tickets.

Choosing a policy

To use a different ticket-cloning policy, make sure to enable any necessary components and then set the newticketlikethis.ticket_cloner option in trac.ini to reference the component’s name like so:

[newticketlikethis]
ticket_cloner = ExcludedFieldsTicketCloner

Configuring permissions

By default the “Clone” button only appears if the user has the TICKET_ADMIN permission. You can change the required permission using the newticketlikethis.ticket_clone_permission option:

[newticketlikethis]
ticket_clone_permission = TICKET_CREATE

ExcludedFieldsTicketCloner

If enabled, the ExcludedFieldsTicketCloner will look for an additional configuration option newticketlikethis.excluded_fields to determine which fields to exclude. This should be a comma-separated list of ticket fields. By default, no fields are excluded. For example, you might use a trac.ini configuration like:

[newticketlikethis]
ticket_cloner = ExcludedFieldsTicketCloner
excluded_fields = description, summary, reporter

Customization

It is easy to implement your own custom policies as well. Look at the code in newticketlikethis.policies for inspiration.

If you implement a custom policy that you would like to share, feel free to submit it as a patch, so that the NewTicketLikeThisPlugin can ship with a strong library of reusable cloning policies.