Friday, August 21, 2009

Configuring Trac Ticket Workflow

Trac is a project management system written in Python. Trac has a powerful issue tracking system in which new issues are created as tickets. The system is flexible enough to allow for custom ticket types. This means that Trac tickets not only allow for issue tracking, but any conceivable software development task as well. There are many other customizations that can be made to Trac tickets such as custom fields and custom work-flow. Tickets in Trac go through a series of states during their lifetime. The current state of a given ticket determines the actions available on that ticket. The state of a ticket in Trac terminology is the ticket status. The ticket work-flow that determines the actions available, the permissions required, and the state the ticket must be in in order to transition are all configurable. In other words, if a given ticket is closed, the only available action for the ticket is to reopen it. This is because of the default Trac ticket work-flow configuration.

In the Trac configuration, ticket actions can be configured to allow for certain ticket states to be active in order to execute the action. So, if you wanted to allow more actions other than reopen on closed tickets, this can be specified in the Trac configuration. Multiple current states may be specified as criteria. Only a single target state may be specified. Below is a simplistic example of a ticket work-flow configuration element.
[ticket-workflow]

action = current_state1, current_state2, current_state3 -> target_state

action.permission = TICKET_MODIFY

action.operation = ticket_operation_name

No comments :

Post a Comment