Self-Introduction: Roger Lipp and a ruby command-line tool for bugzilla

[Lipp, Roger D (Mission Critical Linux)]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Frédéric Buclin [mailto:lpsolit at gmail.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2012 11:47 AM
> To: developers at bugzilla.org
> Cc: Lipp, Roger D (Mission Critical Linux)
> Subject: Re: Self-Introduction: Roger Lipp and a ruby command-line tool for bugzilla
> 
> Le 01. 10. 12 06:46, Lipp, Roger D (Mission Critical Linux) a écrit :
> > I would love to contribute my work to bugzilla, perhaps as a "ruby
> > example of using the webservices api", or as a command-line interface
> > that works behind a corporate firewall.
> > 
> > Is this of interest?
>
>
> Hello Roger,
> 
> All contributions are always welcome, but why choosing Ruby rather than
> Perl as the whole Bugzilla application is written in Perl? :)
>
> Is your CLI running on the server-side or client-side? This part is a
> bit unclear to me.
>
>
> LpSolit


Hello Frédéric,

This script runs on the client side. Ruby was a nice choice because of the ability to easily deal with different encodings (XML, YAML, JSON). By using ruby I don't have a lot of clutter in the code to handle these issues.

To give you a better idea of what I'm doing, here is the help output from my script:

$ rbugz --help
Usage: rbugz [options] [bugid]

General Options:
    -h, --help                       Display this screen
    -v, --verbose                    Output more information
        --version                    Display version information. rbugz 0.2
        --server=SERVER              Select which bugzilla server to interact with. Defaults defined in /opt/rbugz/etc/servers.yaml
    -x, --xml                        display results in XML format (default is YAML)
    -j, --json                       display results in JSON format (default is YAML)
    -i, --include=FIELDLIST          a comma-separated list of fields to include in the output

Login Options:
    -l, --login                      login to bugzilla. Your login cookie will be stored in ~/.bugzilla-cookies.
    -u, --user=USER                  bugzilla user name
    -p, --password=PASSWORD          bugzilla password. Omit this option to be prompted for your password

Defect Lookup Options:
    -a, --all                        display all available information about the bug
    -t, --attachments                display only attachments associated with bug
    -c, --comments                   display only comments associated with bug
    -s, --history                    display history of changes for the bug

Query Options:
    -q, --query=FILENAME             specify a YAML file that contains the query paramenter. STDIN may be passed as the filename


The fun stuff is in the query option. It turns out that the combination of YAML and xmlrpc is a pretty natural fit.  The query file can contain things like:

      creator: roger.lipp at hp.com
      status: [ASSIGNED, OPEN]

Ruby's yaml library will read that in and generate a hash, which can then be handed directly to the xmlrpc call.

All in all, I think this provides a good working example of how to use the WebServices API on the client side.

-Roger