How To See Tracker Items Within Eclipse

From Arianne
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Some might want to see the open tracker items or other helpful queries from within their IDE. With Eclipse and Mylyn you have the possibility to access the project's trackers from within your Eclipse. This page is going to describe how to get this feature into your Eclipse and describes some basics about how to access the trackers with this infrastructure. This article is based on Eclipse Indigo (version 3.7).

Installation and Preparation

To make this feature available in your Eclipse IDE you need to install two new plugins:

  • Mylyn (a task based IDE integration)
  • Generic Web Templates Connector (A connector for retrieving tasks from any web based task repository that is usable via URLs)

To successfully install this combination you have to add several update sites to be able to fulfill all needed dependencies.

  • Mylyn for Eclipse Indigo - [1]
  • Mylyn Incubator for Mylyn 3.7 - [2]
  • Mylyn Snapshots - [3]

With those three update sites enabled you can now install Mylyn and the connector.

Setting Up the Repository

The first step to access the trackers is to add a task repository for each tracker (in our case its only one: stendhal) based on the sourceforge template that comes with the freshly installed connector.

  • Open the "Task Repositories" view
  • Right-click the view and choose "Add task repository"
  • Select "Web Template (Advanced)" and click next
  • From the "Server" drop down menu choose "Sourceforge (jCommander)"
  • Change the "Label" to help identify the repository e.g. Stendhal
  • (Optional) Untick "Anonymous" and enter your sourceforge login details
  • Expand "Additional Settings"
  • Edit the "group_id" parameter and change it to Arianne's id: 1111
  • The "atid" parameter will be changed later
  • Expand "Advanced Configuration" and paste the following into "Query Request URL":
${serverUrl}/tracker/?atid=${atid}&group_id=${group_id}&func=browse
  • Click "Finish"

Access Different Trackers

After having the repositories configured it is possible to query them.

  • Open the "Task List" view to add the query
  • Right-click the view and choose New -> Query
  • Change "Query Title" and "atid" parameter for the different trackers as follows (Create a new query for each of them):
    • 351111 for the feature requests tracker
    • 973767 for the developers' tracker
    • 101111 for the bug tracker
    • 201111 for the support requests tracker
    • 301111 for the patches tracker
  • Click "Finish"

Refining the Queries

The query can be refined by changing the "Query URL" of each query.

To show 100 items (that's the most I can show, I couldn't show all the items) add &limit=100 to the end of the query:

${serverUrl}/tracker/?atid=${atid}&group_id=${group_id}&func=browse&limit=100

To get all the issues that are assigned to a specific user you need to know the id associated with the user's sourceforge account. This can be obtained by going to that user's sourceforge user page (sourceforge.net/users/xxx where xxx is the username). In the "About Me" block it shows the "User Id". Put that number in the query with &assignee=yyy where yyy is the user ID.

${serverUrl}/tracker/?atid=${atid}&group_id=${group_id}&func=browse&assignee=SourceforgeUserID

To get all open issues add &status=1 to the query

${serverUrl}/tracker/?atid=${atid}&group_id=${group_id}&func=browse&status=1

Note that these can be mixed and matched so you can get 100 open issues by adding &limit=100&status=1 to the query.

Working with Tasks

  • Activate Task -> Work on bug, complete fixing -> mark task as completed -> commit has a well prepared commit message prepared and the relevant files are already grouped into a dedicated change set automatically
  • TODO: Is this helpful? What about the automatic commit comment feature of Mylyn?

Links

Sourceforge with Mylyn on wiki.eclipse.org