(seemingly) simple but useful WebService expansion?

[Scott Saad]

Hello,

I would like to kick around an idea for the WebServices API. The past few
days I've been familiarizing myself with the code base. I've also been
trying to search the for existing WebService enhancement requests to see if
what I'm proposing is already covered for a future release. If what I'm
about to say happens to already be planned, please forgive me :-).

Use Case:
Developer X would like to create some type of client side application that
uses the WebService API for Bugzilla. Currently, limited bug information
comes back to the client. (i.e. created, changed, alias, summary) when a
call to Bug.get is made. Plus, the developer must somehow know the list of
bug ID's before making this call. The interest really lies in bugs for
particular products and a query for bugs by product would be very helpful.
With this ability, along with expanded bug information, the usability
becomes more in line with the client as the filtering can now be done on the
client side. This is of course opposed to waiting for the ultimate query API
to be ready, where filtering occurs on the server side.

Proposal:
* There already exists a way to get all products. An enhancement to allow
for the querying of bugs by product (i.e. Bug.getAllByProduct) could be
implemented.
* Expand the WebService:Bug class to include a more complete set of fields.
This would mean including data like, status, assigned_to, priority,
severity, etc.
* With this type of call, the ability for clients to consume valuable bug
information and filtering in the manner it sees fit becomes a possibility.

Disclaimer:
I definitely have not thought this all the way through and being new with
internals of the system I wanted to throw the idea across the wire in hopes
of getting feedback. I debated on whether or not to log an enhancement
request for this because I'm not sure if it's in line with the road map. I
think there are definitely plans to expand the API but this might be a
stepping stone to that expansion. In my opinion, the usefulness of the API
goes through the roof with this type of access. It provides real value with
seeminly tiny impact.

Now, I don't really know if enabling something like this is really "tiny",
but with my limited knowledge and exploration, this is my ignorant claim.

Any thoughts/suggestions/clarifcations would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards,
Scott Saad (saadware)
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