We’ve been loving our Trac install at work, but we are still sanding down a few rough spots. One particular spot that’s been bobbing up has been what happens when “new” tickets have an owner assigned. I liked the ticket status being “new”, because it meant that I could easily look at my ticket list and see tickets that had been directly assigned to me that I hadn’t acknowledged yet by accepting them. Someone else really disliked having to “accept” a ticket that was already assigned to him before he could move it to QA.
I actually managed to create a solution for this using the TicketConditionalCreationStatusPlugin from TracHacks. This plugin allowed me to conditionally set the status of the ticket based on the contents of the “owner” field. This was actually a pretty slick solution, but for various reasons it didn’t sit well with a lot of people.
The next idea we had was to prevent new tickets from being created with any owner besides the default value of “dev” (our dev team mailing list). This solution had three main benefits – It worked the same for everyone; no one would ever have a “new” ticket assigned to them; and the “dev” alias was always associated with a new ticket, which has some value in relation to email notifications.
Easy enough, right? Maybe it’s just me, but I could not find a good way to enforce this. There’s no native ability to hide fields that aren’t drop-downs, and owner’s not a drop down by default. It can be made a drop-down, but not in a manner which would allow it to be removed. There are several owner-oriented plugins, but none of them differentiate between the “new ticket” screen and the “modify ticket” screen.
After a bit of fruitless experimentation I realized that I was overthinking it. I made the following change:
- <body py:match="body" py:attrs="select('@*')">
+ <body onload='document.getElementById("field-owner").disabled = true;' py:match="body" py:attrs="select('@*')">
et voila! My default owner value is visible but immutable!
I know this isn’t a rock-solid solution, but in our environment (restricted corporate access) I’m not worried about evil-doers and griefers, I’m just wanting to remind people that they’re not supposed to change the value…