(seemingly) simple but useful WebService expansion?

[Scott Saad]

Sorry about the verbosity on that one, will definitely keep it short and
sweet in the future. :-)

I've been following the conversations at
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=398281:

I understand not wanting to provide more than one way of getting at bug
information. What concerns me is the possibility that the concept of
Bug.search may be overkill. Is there a need to provide an interface that
mimics bugzilla's search? I know from a bugzilla developer's standpoint it's
the natural approach... the more powerful the better. However, what do the
potential users of the API really want? Do they need all that power? Or
would a function for each use case suffice? ie...

   Bug.GetByUserId
   Bug.GetByProductId
   Bug.GetByStatus
   Bug.GetByPriority

or the overall encompassing call: Bug.GetByParams( UserId, ProductId,
Status, Priority ).

With an approach like this would it solve the majority use cases? Again, I
realize that a super powerful search feels great. Could it be overkill? I
say this not really knowing the user base so I could be missing a huge part
of the picture here.

Thoughts?
Scott

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 4:31 PM, Max Kanat-Alexander <mkanat at bugzilla.org>
wrote:

>        Hey Scott! Wow, very detailed there. :-) No need to write quite
> that much, we're relatively informal--you're free to just say, "Hey, I
> think we should add X to Y, sound good?"
>
>        My responses below:
>
> On Wed, 2 Jul 2008 16:20:16 -0600 "Scott Saad" <saadsj at gmail.com> wrote:
> > and a query for bugs by product would be very helpful.
>
>         The problem is that I don't want, in the future, two ways to do
> the same thing--that can be pretty confusing. Bug.search (or whatever
> we're calling it) will get that information for us, so I don't want to
> add another way to get it. We can't remove functions once we add
> them--that breaks the API--so we have to be careful about what we add.
>
> > * 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.
>
>         Sure, that'd be good. I already have a patch that does that
> somewhere, I might have even attached it to a bug.
>
>        -Max
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