Artifact Update

Selecting an artifact from the list generated by a search operation will bring you to a screen with all the artifact details. Depending on the permissions you have on this tracker, the detailed view is made of text fields and menus that you can update with new values. If you are an anonymous user or a registered user who does not belong to the project team, most of the fields will likely appear as immutable text. By default, non-project members cannot edit any of the artifact fields. They can only submit a follow-up comment.

The Artifact Update screen is divided in several parts: Header and Comments.

Dynamic Fields

Some fields have a particular behaviour and some explanations seem necessary.

  • Automatically edit fields: Tuleap includes fields that are automatically set : “Artifact ID”, “Last Update Date”, “Submitted By”, “Submitted On” and “Rank”. The users can’t edit that fields.

  • Cross-Reference: Tuleap offers another dynamic field which has the ability to cross-reference any artifact, or any other Tuleap object from within a follow-up comment.

    When typing a follow-up comment, any text that follows the pattern “XXX #NNN” will be interpreted as a reference to the artifact XXX number NNN, where NNN is the unique artifact ID, and XXX is the tracker short name (e.g. “bug #123”, “task #321”, “req #12”, etc.). If you don’t know the tracker short name or don’t want to specify it, you may simply use “art #NNN”. Each time Tuleap displays a piece of text that follows this pattern it will auto-magically create an hyperlink to the web page showing all the details of the artifact.

    Tuleap reference patterns may be used to reference artifacts, as well as source code commits, documents, files, etc. Please refer to Tuleap references for more details on References.

    Furthemore references concerning artifacts, svn revisions are stored in the database. They are displayed in the next section, ordered by type and initial reference direction.

Comments

As many follow-up comments as needed can be attached to any given artifact. Follow-up comments are free text fields where virtually any kind of information or comment can be typed in.

Follow-up comments have several of interesting capabilities and extensions:

  • Changeset: Each follow-up comment has a part dedicated to the artifact history. This keeps track of all changes that occurred on all artifact fields since the creation of the artifact. The artifact history shows what fields changed, what the old value was befor the change took place, who changed it and when.

  • Canned Responses: it is not infrequent to see the project members in charge of the artifact classification and dispatch process to post the same follow-up comments again and again. Typical examples of repeatedly posted comments are: a thank you message to the originator, a request for the originator to provide commonly missing information like version numbers or type of machine used, etc. Rather than typing the same comments all the time, Tuleap allows project members to create a predefined set of responses. Each canned response is defined by a name and by the body of the response.

    Posting a canned response is just a matter of selecting the appropriate response from the pull down menu in the artifact update screen and submitting the changes.

File attachments

You can attach files to an artifact by using file field.

Please note that it is possible to drag ‘n drop (or copy/paste) images directly in the text or in the follow-up comment field as soon as they are in html mode.

Such images will be added in the first updatable file field in the artifact.

Drag ‘n drop or copy/paste are not possible if:

  • there isn’t any file field

  • the file field is not updatable (due to permissions) or is frozen (due to workflow)