Review Board 1.7.8 Release Notes¶

Release date: June 2, 2013

New Features¶

Added Depends On and Blocks fields to review requests. (Bug #281)

Review requests can now indicate that they depend on another review request. Reviewers can use this to gain some context on what the review request is built upon, or to see what needs to be reviewed along with it.

A review request listing another review request will appear in the other review request’s “Blocks” list.

Patch by Jon Demelo.
Added an improved support page.

Clicking Get Support will now take the user to our official Support landing page. For most installs, this page will show some handy links (knowledge base, documentation, bug tracker, and others), and link to the administrator’s configured e-mail address.

Companies that have a support contract with us will also have a contact form on this page for one-on-one priority support.
Added the ability to set where Get Support takes users.

If your organization has their own support page (such as a wiki), you can configure Get Support to point there instead of our page. This is available through the new Support settings page in the administration UI.
Added improved logging for many operations.

Operations such as generating diffs now show the user who performed the operation. This can help with debugging and support.

Reduced the upload time for many new diffs.

Review Board performs file existence checks when uploading diffs, which end up fetching data from the server for each file.

We now cache the results of these checks in order to prevent subsequent diffs from having to check again. We also take into account files already fetched by the diff viewer. This makes it much faster to iterate on diffs.
The templates used for rendering the various pages are now cached after the first render, speeding up the rendering for any future renders. We’ve seen speedups of ~100-120ms for review request pages.

The cache is local to each web server thread/process, so the benefits depend largely on your setup.

The review request actions are now larger, making them more visible and easier to hit, particularly on touch screens.
Clicking Fixed, Drop or Re-open now keeps the page in the same scroll position. It would previously scroll slightly due to the addition/removal of an entry in the issue summary table.
The dashboard now reloads dynamically, without reloading the entire page. If there’s a server or connection issue when trying to load the dashboard, it will just try again later, instead of showing an error page.
The comment dialog now tells you when you can’t make a comment (due to being logged out or reviewing something that’s part of a draft). This helps prevent confusion and silent errors when saving comments.

Fixed deleting pending replies to comments. This would always return Forbidden before.
Fixed some issues returning certain lists of data. It was possible that data could change between the time of generating the API response and returning it to the browser, but this is no longer possible.

Extensions can now customize their metadata directly in the Extension class. Previously, we used the package metadata for things like the extension name, author, version, etc., meaning that a package could have at most one extension. They can now have as many as you choose.

This is customized by including a metadata dictionary field on the Extension class. The keys and values correspond to standard Python egg metadata keys and values.
TemplateHooks can now render their own content by overriding render_to_string(). They no longer need to take a template parameter.
NavigationBarHook can now take a url_name parameter specifying the URL name to link to.
Review UIs can now specify the link and link text for any comments on a review by overriding get_comment_link_url() and get_comment_link_text().
Custom hosting services can now be registered/unregistered by extensions by using register_hosting_service() and unregister_hosting_service() (from reviewboard.hostingsvcs.service).
Added the ability to more easily write hosting services support that works for self-installable services. Right now, this is not used, but sets us up for future hosting service additions.

Added missing repository validation for Mercurial repositories.
Fixed replying to comments on file attachments that have since been removed.
Fixed the display of the upload dialogs when viewing a file attachment. They were appearing blank.
Comments on file attachments in e-mails now link to the correct review UI handling the file.
Worked around rare issues where a reset of the Open An Issue default for a user would cause pages to break.

E-mails now show the user’s full name instead of just their first name. (Bug #2965)

Patch by Raja Venkataraman.
The New Review Request page now mentions RBTools instead of just post-review.