Custom fields and more (was Re: 2.16.5/2.17.7 release prep)

[Sean McAfee]

Steven Suson <suson at TuckerEnergy.com> wrote:
>I'm VERY glad to hear that you are still working on Custom Fields! It's 
>unfortunate that you haven't been able to maintain the web interface for 
>field management, as I found it extremely easy to use.

The main factors contributing to the obsolescence of that interface were
a) the elimination of the field groups mechanism, and b) the elimination
of field default values, which turned out not to be terribly useful.
Anyway, if it's ever necessary to give a field a default value, it can
be done programmatically.

Incidentally, I created a module Bugzilla::Local as a repository for
site-local code.  In my last message I described how, when a new incident is
created in a particular product, its "Incident Number" field is set to one
higher than the current highest value of that field; the code that does this
lives in Bugzilla::Local.  What do folks think of this approach?

I'll try to get a basic patch out early next week.  It's going to be
quite a chore disentangling the basic implementation from the layers of
functionality I've built on top of it, even with my efforts to keep things
compartmentalized.

Oh, and here are a few more features I forgot to mention in my original
message.  Comments on their general usefulness or suitability are welcome.

Fields may optionally have a brief textual description.  For fields which do
have such a description, a small icon appears next to the field's name in
the web interface.  If the mouse cursor is hovered over this icon, the
description appears in a tooltip.

A field may be made strictly read-only.  Such a field may not be altered in
any way via the web interface, but only programmatically.  I use this
feature to fix the alternate-bug-identification-number field I mentioned
earlier, preventing users from altering it.

A long string field may be made "journaling", or append-only.  Edits to this
field are tagged with a standard prefix including the name of the user
making the entry and the date and time.


--Sean