Review Board 2.0 Beta 3 Release Notes¶

Better Issue and Ship-It Tracking¶

If there are any open issues remaining on a review request, they will be shown in place of the Ship It count in the dashboard. Any Ship Its issued on the review request will remain hidden until all issues are resolved.

This makes it easier to see what work still remains at a glance, and to give a better idea if a Ship It really means Ship It.

Improvements were also made for reviews. Now, if a reviewer marks Ship It and opens issues, the “Ship It!” will be replaced by “Fix it, then Ship it!” until all the issues are closed. Once the last issue is closed, it will update to “Ship It!”

Detailed Change Descriptions¶

The “Review request changed” boxes provided only basic information on what changed when publishing a draft of a review request. It wasn’t very helpful when uploading new file attachments or when changing a long description.

This has been fully rewritten to be much more useful:

• The Description and Testing Done changes are now shown as a diff, making it very easy to see what parts of the description has changed.

  Any Markdown formatting is also rendered in the diff view.

  (Bug #2045)

  

• Added or removed file attachments are shown with their thumbnails.

  The thumbnails in the change description box include a “Review” or “New Comment” link, to allow jumping directly to the review UI without needing to find the matching thumbnail at the top of the page.

  This also helps when you want to see older file attachments that have since been removed.

  

• More information is shown about the contents of new diffs.

  The total number of added or removed lines are shown alongside the diff revision, making it easy to see just how big the change is.

  A file listing is also shown for the diff, along with the same icons now used in the diff viewer to show the complexity of the changes made to the files.

  

• The other fields, like Branch and Depends On, are shown in a way that makes it much easier to see what has changed.

  Some of the fields also show more information than they used to. Depends On, for example, now shows the summaries of the review requests.

Custom fields provided by extensions will benefit from these updates as well, and can also take advantage of the new API to customize how the updates are displayed.

Indentation Markers in Diffs¶

In order to simplify reviews, the diff viewer has traditionally treated lines with only indentation changes as being equal. This was often helpful, but it meant that it wasn’t always obvious that a line’s indentation had changed.

The diff viewer now shows indentation changes, and differentiates between spaces and tabs. The lines are still shown as equals, to keep the diffs clean, but it’s now easy to tell at a glance what indentation changes were made to a file.

This is especially important for languages that use whitespace for blocks, such as Python.

New My Account Page¶

The My Account page has been completely rewritten. The original was from the very first few months of Review Board, and was long overdue due for a replacement.

The new page makes it easy to search for groups and join them and to manage your settings and your profile.

Extensions can add new sections to the My Account page, or add to existing sections, in order to provide user customization of an extension.

Easy File Downloads in the Diff Viewer¶

Files shown in the diff viewer can now be downloaded in their raw, original form. A download icon is shown alongside the revision of each file. This makes it easy to fetch either the original or modified version of any file up for review.

Bug #1434

Improved Dashboard Sidebar¶

The dashboard sidebar is now better organized, neatly categorizing items under “Incoming” and “Outgoing” sections. There’s no longer a bunch of bold items that double as links and sections.

The current dashboard view is also highlighted, making it easier to see what you’re looking at.

Determining Approval for Review Requests¶

Review Board tries hard not to dictate workflows for developers and companies, but to instead provide a solid platform for existing workflows. Many companies or individual teams have their own policies for when a review request is approved.

We’re now providing a way through the API and extensions to determine if a review request is approved. Approval logic can be provided by an extension, and then used in repository hooks or other scripts.

By default, the logic marks a review request as approved if it has at least one Ship It!, and no open issues. This can be augmented or completely replaced.

The Review Board web UI does not indicate approval or enforce any actions based on approval, so by default, nothing really changes. This is more for those companies that are adding their own deeper integration or policy enforcement.

Interdiff Link on the Draft Banner¶

When uploading a new diff to an existing review request, the draft banner will now show a “Show changes” link that will take you to an interdiff between the last published diff and the newly uploaded diff.

Patch by Tomi Äijö

Bug #3189

Better Post-Commit Support for Subversion¶

The new “New Review Request” page didn’t work so well for Subversion users that had a non-standard repository layout, such as one where the project name was on the root instead of “trunk” and “branches.”

Now, on these sort of layouts, a drop-down list showing the top-level directories will be provided. Selecting a project will show commits for that project.

Other Changes¶

• There’s a better set of default dashboard columns for new users. These are, in order:

  • Select Rows

  • New Updates

  • Ship It!

  • My Comments

  • Summary

  • Submitter

  • Last Updated (Relative)

  Existing users won’t see their columns change. If they want to use the new columns, they can click the Pencil on the top-right of the dashboard and customize their columns.

• Added a Diff Size column to the dashboard, which shows the number of inserted and deleted lines in the uploaded patch. (Bug #48)

• Added a keyboard shortcut (r/R) to comment on the selected chunk in the diff viewer. (Bug #44)

  Patch by Edwin Zhang.

• Discarded review requests are now shown in the All Review Requests page. (Bug #576)

• The Depends On field now shows a strikethrough for dependencies that have been closed. (Bug #3200)

  Patch by Olessia Karpova.

• Public local sites can now be accessed by anonymous users.

New Initialize Method¶

Instead of overriding Extension.__init__() and passing arguments to the parent method, extensions can now simply override initialize(). This doesn’t take any arguments, and there’s no need to call the parent method.

This means instead of this:

class MyExtension(Extension):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(MyExtension, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

        # Initialization here

You can just do this:

class MyExtension(Extension):
    def initialize(self):
        # Initialization here

Improved JavaScript Extensions¶

JavaScript extensions in earlier betas were specified by defining a js_model_class property. This has been replaced by an all new JSExtension class.

JSExtension contains attributes for model_class (equivalent to the old js_model_class), and apply_to, which allows the extension to be initialized only on the pages with the given URL names.

One or more JavaScript extensions can be provided by setting the list of subclasses in Extension.js_extensions.

Per-Page Static Media Bundles¶

Static media bundles (defined by css_bundles and js_bundles on an Extension) can now be applied to specific pages by specifying an apply_to field in the bundle definition. This field takes a list of URL names that the bundle should be loaded on. It works like the default bundle in that the bundles don’t have to be manually loaded in a template.

Pre-Defined URL Name Lists¶

There’s now a few useful lists of URL names that an extension can import that can be used for any apply_to fields, to help ensure hooks or static media bundles apply to the necessary pages.

This includes diffviewer_url_names, reviewable_url_names and review_request_url_names, which can be imported from reviewboard.urls.

New Hooks¶

General UI¶

• Improved the logic for Markdown escaping.

  We do a better job now of escaping only the necessary characters, in order to reduce the number of backslashes in the text when uploading a change.

• Pressing Enter in auto-complete fields now properly completes the selected entry. (Bug #2779)

  This applies to the reviewer fields, search, and any other field that can be auto-completed.

• Pressing Enter on an auto-completed item in the search field now navigates to that item. (Bug #3032)

  Patch by Mirai Akagawa.

• Right-click and pasting content into the comment dialogs now enables the Save button. (Bug #2424)

• The user information popup (shown when hovering over a username on the dashboard, review requests, or reviews) now wraps overly long e-mail addresses. (Bug #3215)

  Patch by Stephanie Su.

New Review Request Page¶

• Fixed creating a review request based on the first committed change in a GitHub repository in the New Review Request page. (Bug #3207)

  Patch by Anselina Chia.

• When failing to post a change for review in the New Review Request page, an error is now shown, and the user can try again.

Dashboard¶

• Going to a dashboard view for a group you aren’t a member of, such as an unjoined starred group, no longer results in a 404 page. (Bug #3204)

• Review request summaries can now wrap if they’re getting too long. (Bug #2125)

• The pagination links can no longer overwrite the dashboard view states, such as the current page, column sorts, or Show/Hide filters. This also applies to the All Review Requests page, and other datagrid pages. (Bug #1155)

• Fixed cases where crafting a URL for sorting non-sortable fields could cause an HTTP 500 error. (Bug #2565)

Review Requests¶

• The bugs field on a review request no longer allows duplicates. (Bug #3063)

• The Repository field on a review request is once again hidden if the review request isn’t tied to a repository.

• Fixed regressions in storing and rendering changes to the Depends On field. (Bug #3073, Bug #3139)

• SHA-1 commit IDs are now shown abbreviated in the Commit ID field on a review request, instead of making the field too wide.

• Fixed deleting file attachments without first having a draft.

• Review replies are now rendered as Markdown when saved.

• Thumbnails for file attachments can no longer overflow the container.

  Patch by Tami Forrester.

• Fixed escaping of HTML-unsafe characters in the Description and Testing Done fields.

• Review requests for inactive users are now shown on the All Review Requests page and the user page. (Bug #1436)

Diff Viewer¶

• When calculating function headers for PHP files, those functions with public, private, and protected keywords are now included. (Bug #2951)

• Fixed possible deadlock issues when generating side-by-side diffs. (Bug #2247)

• Fixed showing interdiffs for files that are reverted. (Bug #1486)

• Fixed showing changes in interdiffs that were made in the first 3 lines of a file.

• Fixed interdiffs for 1-line files.

• The expand icon is no longer shown if the section cannot be expanded.

• Lines that have move indicator flags no longer have misaligned line numbers.

• Fixed an occasional visual glitch with the diff complexity icons.

Markdown Review¶

• Markdown file attachments now render more correctly. In particular, lists are now properly shown, and the source code doesn’t show red boxes around quotes.

Mercurial¶

• Fixed issues with trailing slashes in the Mercurial URL when using hg-history lookups. (Bug #3216)

Subversion¶

• Filenames that contain a space are no longer cut off. This only applies to newly uploaded files. (Bug #1533)

CVS¶

• Diffs generated on Windows that use nul: for the “old filename” when generating a diff for a new file are now handled correctly. (Bug #2294)

• Repositories that don’t contain a CVSROOT/modules file can now be added. (Bug #1986)

Clear Case¶

• Clear Case no longer fails in multi-site mode when OIDs aren’t yet available on the server. (Bug #3183)

  Patch by Nicolas Dély.

LDAP¶

• Usernames, domains and passwords are now encoded to UTF-8 before sending them over LDAP. (Bug #2978)

• Usernames are now normalized, preventing issues when users log in with otherwise valid variations of a username. This converts to lowercase and strips special characters. (Bug #1478, Bug #1674, Bug #2924)

• LDAP users who don’t have an e-mail address configured will no longer be prevented from logging into Review Board. (Bug #3257)

System Administration¶

• When specifying “https” on the server URL in the General Settings page, the links generated by Review Board in e-mails and the API will use HTTPS. (Bug #3085, Bug #3246)

• System administrators can now access private repositories. (Bug #3118)

• Review counts are now reset for users when deleting a repository. (Bug #3192)

• Old repository entries using paths that no longer exist can now properly be hidden. (Bug #2361)

• When creating a new site installation, the passwords the users confirm are now properly matched. (Bug #3006)

  Patch by Tami Forrester.

• The filter menu for the database browser is now shown in full, even when there are no or few entries in the list. (Bug #3222)

  Patch by Joonas Lindholm.