Overview¶
All work in Review Board is centered around a review request. Each review request represents a coherent work item that’s undergoing the code review or editing process, be it a prospective code change, design document, or other piece of work.
A review request is split into several sections and views. When you first open a review request, you’ll see a large box at the top which contains all of the information about the request.
At the top-right are the two major views for the review request: The first is the Reviews view, which has all of the reviews that people have done, as well as a record of the changes that have been made to the review request. The second is the Diff view, which shows the code changes themselves.
Next to the view tabs are several action commands, both for manipulating the state of the review request, as well as performing reviews. At the top-left are visibility controls (Star, Archive and Mute).
The review request box itself is primarily devoted to user-supplied information about whatever is under review. There are several fields such as a one-line summary and long-form description, as well as pieces of metadata such as the branch that the code change has been made on, links to any relevant bugs, and a list of people and groups who are being asked to review this review request. See Editing Fields for more information.
Below the fields are any file attachments that have been added to the review request. Like the diff, file attachments can each be individually reviewed. See Uploading File Attachments and Reviewing File Attachments for more details.
At the bottom of the review request box is a table which lists all of the open issues for this review request. Issues are created when people add a comment and mark it as an issue, and are a convenient way of keeping track of the work left to do.
Drafts¶
When a review request is first created, it is marked as a draft, and is not yet visible to anyone other than the author. This is shown by the presence of a green draft bar at the top of the page. Once everything has been set up to the author’s liking, clicking Publish will publish the review request to all of the chosen reviewers.
When any changes are made to a published review request, including uploading a new revision of the diff, updating, deleting, and uploading file attachments, or making changes to any of the fields, a new draft will be created. The changes will not be visible to anyone until the draft is published.