Review Board 2.5 Release Notes¶

Design Update¶

Review Board’s visual design was starting to get a little long in the tooth.

These features have significant updates:

• The dashboard

• Review requests and reviews

• The diff viewer

• The New Review Request page

• User pages

In addition to the large, obvious redesigns, several smaller pieces of UI have been polished up:

• The highlighted chunk in the diff viewer now uses a highlight on either side of the view which doesn’t cover up any content or cause the page to “jump”.

• The comment dialog has been updated to soften the look a bit, increase the default size (so you have more room to write your comments), and prevent visual jumpiness.

• The old animated GIF spinners throughout the UI have been replaced with a modern icon-font based spinner that looks great on all screens.

• The issue summary table on review requests has some visual polish and offers a better way to filter statuses.

Mobile UI¶

• Most of Review Board’s UI has been updated to work better on small screens (such as those found on phones and tablets).

  The main navigation in Review Board is now accessible via a side menu, activated by tapping the hamburger icon. Through the mobile UI, you can read through your dashboard and participate in discussions on existing reviews while out and about.

  The diff viewer, review dialog, and attachment review experiences are not yet mobile-friendly. We’ll be unveiling updates in the future that will make it easy to review code and attachments from your phone or tablet.

  Based on work by Jason Tseng.

Review Requests¶

Expandable Diff Fragments in Reviews¶

Fragments of diffs shown in reviews can now be expanded and collapsed, just like in the diff viewer. When hovering over the fragment, controls will be shown for expanding by 20 lines, expanding all lines, or expanding to the nearest function/class header.

Bug #2041

Diff Viewer¶

• Smarter detection of file types for syntax highlighting. (Bug #337)

  The diff viewer now displays more accurate syntax highlighting for files, based on the contents of the files, rather than simply making a determination based off the file extension. This means smarter highlighting for specialized XML files, HTML templates, Objective C++, and more.

• Allow double-click to create a comment.

  Double-clicking anywhere on a line in the diff viewer will now create a comment on that line. You can still click-and-drag the line numbers to select multiple lines, but for a quick one-line comment, a double-click may be faster. It’s also more familiar to those coming from services like GitHub or Bugzilla Splinter.

  Patch by Mike Conley.

• Comment bubble tooltips now show rendered Markdown.

  The comment bubbles on the line numbers have always had a tooltip to preview the comment text. These tooltips now contain the rendered Markdown text rather than raw Markdown, showing how your comment will look when published.

  Patch by Wu Di.

File Attachments¶

“Live HD” Thumbnails¶

In an era of high-resolution screens, the old postage-stamp size file attachment thumbnails with lots of knobs and buttons looked pretty outdated.

File attachment thumbnails are now shown as large, clean images. These thumbnails will show some UI options when hovering the mouse over them, and will also scroll to reveal more of the image.

Diffs for Image Attachments¶

As mentioned, you can now diff between file attachments. This includes images! You can compare any two revisions of an image and leave comments on the comparison.

There are four comparison modes available:

• Difference: Color differences between the two images will be shown. Every pixel that’s the same between the images will be shown in black. Added pixels are shown in their original color. Differences in pixel values are also shown.

• Onion skinning: By using a transparency slider, you can see subtle changes made between the images. The slider will change the transparency of the modified image. This helps to see if any pixels move, disappear, or otherwise change.

• Split: The images will overlap, and a horizontal slider will control how much of each image you’re seeing, allowing you to compare the images incrementally.

• Two-Up: The images will be displayed side-by-side, unaltered. You will only be able to select regions to comment on the modified file, but that same area for both will be shown in the review.

Miscellaneous User Features¶

• See all reviews by a user at a glance.

  The user page now has a tab for showing all reviews of a change that were posted by the user.

  Patch by Tami Forrester.

• Smarter pagination for lists of users. (Bug #829)

  The “Users” page, which displays a list of all users on the server, now has a smarter alphabetical paginator. This makes it much easier to jump to users whose usernames start with a specific letter, number, or symbol.

  Patch by Ryan Done.

• Improved support for trophies.

  There’s now a permanent record of all trophies received by each person. It’s also possible for extensions to create new types of trophies. We’re planning to add support for viewing all of your trophies in a future release.

• The display name for a group is now shown on the group page. (Bug #3945)

  Patch by Kristina Vandergulik.

Webhooks¶

Review Board now has support for configuring webhooks.

Review Board can be set to post review request information to specified URLs when publishing review requests, closing them, or reopening them.

It also supports sending review API payloads for publishing a review or a reply to a review. The payload will include all comments filed on the review.

The payloads can be sent in JSON, XML, or HTTP form data formats. They can also be completely replaced by a custom template, powered by a subset of Django’s templating language. This can make use of the original payload’s contents as variables, allowing any custom payload format to be sent.

The HTTP requests will contain a X-ReviewBoard-Event header that lists the event name, and a standard X-Hub-Signature header which contains a HMAC signaure of the payload. If the webhook is configured with a “secret,” that secret will be used as the key for the HMAC digest.

Webhooks can be configured to be global across all repositories, tied to specific repositories, or to review requests/reviews not associated with a repository. They can also be tied to any number of events.

See the documentation for more details.

Support for Review Board Gateway¶

Review Board Gateway is our upcoming standalone service that wraps your Git repositories with a fully-featured API, making it easier to integrate them with Review Board. Git repositories backed by Review Board Gateway include full support for browsing and posting commits in the New Review Request page. Future releases will provide even deeper integration, making it easy to manage all your repositories.

Review Board Gateway is not yet released. We’ll make an announcement as soon as it’s ready.

Patch by Jessica Yuen.

Support for Assembla¶

Assembla is a repository hosting and project management service that supports Git, Subversion, and Perforce repositories.

Review Board now supports configuring Subversion and Perforce repositories hosted on Assembla. Git is not supported, though, due to missing API features.

Miscellaneous Admin Features¶

• Widgets on the administrator dashboard can now be added or removed.

  This allows the dashboard to contain only the information useful to the administrator. To remove a widget, simply click the X. To add, click the Add Small Widgets or Add Large Widgets link in the desired column.

  Patch by Stephanie Su.

• New options for targeting e-mails to groups.

  E-mail updates from review requests can now be sent both to the configured mailing list of a review group and to all members of that review group, instead of just one or the other. This can be configured separately for each review group.

• Added support for OpenStack Swift for file storage.

  Swift is an alternative to Amazon S3 for private clouds. When configured, all new file attachments will be uploaded to Swift instead of on the Review Board server. This helps when scaling Review Board out to multiple servers, and reduces load on the Review Board server.

  Patch by Omar Ali.

• Add new users to groups by default.

  Groups have a new setting to add new users by default. Turning this on will cause newly-registered users to be automatically added to the group.

  Patch by Stanley Yeo.

API Tokens¶

Users can now configure multiple API tokens, which are a more secure way of authenticating with the web API. API tokens don’t require the user’s password, and can be easily revoked at any time.

Tokens can restrict the client’s access to the API. Through a simple drop-down menu, an API token can be set to allow full read/write access to the API, read-only access, or a custom policy.

Custom API token policies allow for very fine-grained access to the API, limiting what methods can be performed on exactly which resources, even down to the resource ID level.

To add API tokens, simply open the My Account page, click API Tokens, and then Generate a new API token. That token can then be configured and used immediately.

See the API authentication documentation for instructions on using API tokens with the API.

RBTools 0.6.3 and higher support authenticating with API tokens.

Other API Features¶

• Added support for returning only certain fields or links in the API.

  API resources now support a couple new query arguments for limiting the results in a payload, in order to reduce database queries and payload sizes.

  The ?only-fields= query argument limits the returned fields in the payload to the comma-separated list of field names. If the value is blank, then no fields will be returned, leaving only links.

  Likewise, the ?only-links= query argument limits the returned links in the payload. It behaves exactly like ?only-fields=.

• Added Hosting Service List Resource for accessing information on registered hosting services.

  This resource exposes information on each hosting service that can be used with Review Board. Right now, the information is pretty basic, but it will be used down the road to provide access to information and functionality on the hosting services.

  It also links to all associated hosting service accounts and local configured repositories.

  Note that this resource’s payload data is not yet considered stable, and is subject to change in future releases.

• Added Remote Repository List Resource for listing all available remote repositories on a hosting service.

  Repositories can be filtered by the owner, type of owner (organization or user), and service-specific filters.

  Note that this resource isn’t available for all hosting services, and the API is not yet considered stable.

• Hosting Service Account List Resource now allows for filtering by username or hosting service ID.

  The list resource now takes ?username= and ?service= arguments for filtering the resulting list by the username and/or service ID.

• Added API Token List Resource for working with your user’s list of API tokens.

  This resource makes it easy to fetch your user’s list of API tokens, to create new tokens, update existing tokens, and delete tokens.

  This resource is only accessible if using a username and password for authentication, and cannot be accessed if using an API token. This is to prevent a client with a valid read-only token to fetch the list of tokens and swap out the one used for authentication.

• The File Attachment Resource now contains a revision field. This is used for Revisioned File Attachments.

• The Repository Resource now contains a bug_tracker field.

  Patch by Halvor Lund.

• In the Review Request Resource, the depends_on and blocks fields now include the ID of the review requests being linked to. (Bug #3863).

• Added a WebHook Resource for managing webhooks. See Webhooks for more information on this new feature.

• Added a review_requests.trivial_publish API capability.

  Clients can use this to determine if they can publish review requests and reviews without sending e-mail.

New Hooks¶

• Added a hook for creating widgets in the administration dashboard.

  AdminWidgetHook allows extensions to register widgets to be shown in the administration UI. These hooks will be available for administrators to add to the dashboard. Widgets are automatically removed when the extension is disabled.

  Patch by Justin Maillet.

• Added a hook for adding capability flags to the Web API.

  WebAPICapabilitiesHook allows extensions to register custom capability flags to show in the API’s Root List Resource. This helps clients of the API that support the extension to query its capabilities without loading a custom resource.

  Patch by Justin Maillet.

• Added new extension hooks for manipulating the recipient list for review and review request e-mails.

  The new EmailHook allows an extension to designate new lists of recipients for all the review/review request e-mails that Review Board sends. They can update both the To and CC lists for any e-mail.

  These take lists of signals the hook should listen to for the various events (such as review_request_published). As a convenience, callers can make use of one of the subclasses for specific events:

  • ReviewRequestPublishedEmailHook

  • ReviewRequestClosedEmailHook

  • ReviewPublishedEmailHook

  • ReviewReplyPublishedEmailHook

Extension Web APIs¶

• API resources provided by extensions can now add specialized serialization of links.

  Subclasses of WebAPIResource can implement a serialize_<linkname>_link() function to provide the desired information for the link. This is useful for links that need to contain additional metadata about the link that would be helpful to the consumer.

Dashboard¶

• Fixed the “Submitter” column to not wrap lines when usernames contain wrappable characters such as hyphens.

Diff viewer¶

• Fixed some problems with interdiffs resulting from rebased changes.

• Fixed displaying trophies on the diff viewer page.

• Fixed caching issues with interdiffs.

E-mail¶

• Fixed Unicode errors when sending e-mails with UTF-8 content. (Bug #3926, Bug #3943)

• Image comments now contain absolute URLs, instead of relative URLs. (Bug #3944)

  Patch by Daniel Arteaga.

• Fixed an issue with the “Get e-mail notifications for my own activity.” (Bug #3895)

  This setting was not working when posting a change against both a target group of which the user is a member and another target user, and then posting a review on that review request.

File Attachments¶

• Fixed commenting on text-based file attachments.

• Fixed sensitivity of the “Upload” button on the file attachment form when no file had been selected. (Bug #3829)

  Patch by Vincent Le.

Repositories¶

• Fixed an error when invoking a repository hook for closing review requests when the referenced review request was not yet published.

Review Requests¶

• Fixed some syntax highlighting issues with entering Markdown in text fields.

• The issue summaries on a review request no longer show raw Markdown source.

  Patch by Teresa Fan.

• Fixed downloading raw diffs with commas in their filenames on Chrome. (Bug #3704)

  Patch by Chester Li.

• Opening and closing editors no longer results in review request or review drafts.

• Fixed the review reply draft banner sticking around in memory and listening for events after publishing a reply.

• Fixed the review request update bubble appearing below other elements on the page.

• Discarded review requests in the “Depends On” field are now shown with a strikethrough. (Bug #3758)

  This previously worked for submitted review requests, and has been expanded to all closed review requests.

  Patch by Yorie Nakayama.

New Review Request¶

• Default reviewers are now added when posting commits for review using the web UI. (Bug #3900)

  Patch by Xutong Liu.

• Fixed posting commits from GitLab for review when the commits were lacking a commit message.

Web API¶

• Fixed links in the Hosting Service Account Resource when using local sites.

CVS¶

• Fixed Unicode errors when normalizing keywords in CVS diffs. (Bug #3931)

Subversion¶

• Fixed Unicode errors when parsing SVN diffs containing accented characters in the revision strings.

  Patch by Maxime Besson.

SSH¶

• Repository paths containing invalid ports no longer generate cryptic error messages. (Bug #3891)

  Patch by Justin Wu.