Redmine › Extended Fields

Download Extended Fields 0.2.3

This is the first time, the new release of the Extended Fields plugins comes with... less features. At least for Redmine 2.5.x. Thus, for this Redmine version it does not support the “Wiki text” and the “Link” custom field types any more... This is the “bad” news. The good news is, that these features are not needed for Redmine 2.5.x! As the latter supports such custom field types out of the box – the native “Long text” custom field type now comes with the “Text formatting” option, that enables the Wiki formatting, and the “Link” custom field type is now built-in.

In fact, any feature I implement in my plugins is intended to extend Redmine, so I’m only happy to see such features implemented in the core! It would be just great, if the functionality of all my plugins was available in (or included into) Redmine, as I would not need to do anything in my plugins in such case.

Generally, Redmine 2.5.x comes with a lot of improvements for custom fields. Thus, it fixes issues:

• #1179 – Optionally allow Text and Long Text custom fields support wiki formatting
• #1358 – Link_to for Custom Field
• #2083 – CustomField of type “external-link-to” with configurable URL prefix
• #3651 – New URL custom field option
• #5250 – Custom Fields may allow full text transformation
• #5794 – URL custom fields
• #8152 – Render Version and User custom fields as links
• #11712 – Custom fields — links and links templates

Which were (or are) fully or partially fixed by the Extended Fields plugin. Anyway this is, in fact, only a small part of the plugin’s functionality, so the plugin remains usuful.

Also, it’s worth mentioning, that Redmine 2.5.x comes with a better extandability of custom fields API (i.e., it’s now easier to extend them programmatically).

Additionally, the Extended Fields 0.2.3 comes with fixes for bugs:

• #2258 – Custom fields in spent time details are not shown
• #2262 – CR/LF seem to inject additional blank lines

Download Extended Fields 0.2.2

Support for the recent Redmine version, which is 2.3.x, was added to the Extended Fields plugin some time ago. But the release of the new version was not made... I was busy on other projects, so I just added a note, that the plugin supporting Redmine 2.3 can be fetched through SVN. Anyway the release was to be made and, finally, I got ready to do this!

So the main change in 0.2.2 is support for Redmine 2.3.x.

In addition this release also comes with support for ChiliProject 3.x, which accidentally got broken in 0.2.1.

The Extended Fields plugin is one of the most complicated plugins, I developed for Redmine. It’s because it needs to change a lot in the Redmine core and, therefore, can break a lot... I would stick an “experimental” stamp image on its home page, if the plugin was not such old (too late for it to become experimental). Anyway, it works fine! But... bugs appear, and they are a lot (compared to my other plugins).

So, certainly, this version comes with a lot of bug fixes. They include: fix for multi-select custom fields (#2176 and #2177), fix for custom field templates loading (#2172), fix of duplicate issue IDs (#2187), fixes for crashes (#2153, #2164, #2175 and #2182) and more. Luckily the plugin has grown a large community and I was not alone in bug fixing – many guys helped me! Thus, Dipan Mehta made a deep research of and suggested a fix for #2176, the similar was done by Eric Mills for #2177, Domingo Oropeza suggested a fix for #2153, very similar fix for its duplicate #2182 was suggested by Gregory, Alexandr Gremyachkin suggested a fix for a complex issue #2172 and Bruno Spyckerelle suggested a fix for #2187. Thank you, guys! Sorry, if I missed someone or someone’s contribution.

Traditionally this version also comes with a new translation and an update to the existing translation. Thus, Pierre-Yves Dubreucq supplemented the French translation (#2174) and Riccardo Rocca submitted the Italian translation (#2185). Thanks!

In addition to the above this release also comes with improvements, some of which can be considered to be new features...

Thus, all text fields in the project form now get the equal width, which is wider than before. This way you now have more space for values of project custom fields.

With this release I also intended to show you how voting and/or watching may help you get your favorite issue to be fixed sooner. Thus, I chose the issue with the highest number of votes and watchers and resolved it in this version.

This way 0.2.2 makes Redmine show custom fields of the “Date” type on the calendar (see #2139). Currently the plugin shows all issue, project and version custom fields and only on the project calendar (i.e., not in my page’s block).

And, finally, rich custom fields (like, custom fields of the “Wiki text” type) are now rendered rich in columns on the issue list page as well. This, of course, can also be considered to be a bug fix.

As it has been mentioned above the Extended Fields plugin interposes so deeply into Redmine, that it just can’t avoid conflicting with other plugins!..

Thus, this plugin overrides the project list (to add custom columns), what is also done by my other plugin – Project Removal. So this version also includes code to show the Project Removal’s Redirect button in the project list, if the latter plugin is istalled. This change does not affect installations, which do not use prject:project-removal.

I have also developed another plugin, which is so complicated and interposes so deeply, that it even includes the “experimental” stamp on its home page. It’s the ISSUE-id plugin! So no wonder, that these plugins conflicted... As both overrode the same issue list page. Therefore, to prevent the conflict the Extended Fields plugin also includes some code to support ISSUE-id.

Download Extended Fields 0.2.1

When Redmine 2.2.x came out, I just started the editing phase of my book (see the announcement). So I needed to learn new features quickly and to update the book accordingly. Thus, since that time I was not able to work on plugins (the book was published recently). And this is the first my plugin, which comes with Redmine 2.2.x support.

When releasing 0.2.0b I felt too unsure about the stability of the plugin (see the appropriate news). And this feeling appeared to be correct – 0.2.0b was quite buggy (so the “b” in the version is very appropriately). This fact was the main reason for starting preparing the updated version. Another reason – Redmine 2.2.x came later.

Many people helped me to discover issues, fixes for which you will get with this release! But Alexander Kuznecov went deeper and suggested changes to the code. This helped me much! Thanks, Alexander!

Let me remind you, that you can get notifications about new releases of this plugin (and news, if you want) by “subscribing” to this project using the “Subscription” form on the sidebar (to the right).

Also you can now order my book about Redmine, titled “Mastering Redmine” and published by Packt Publishing, using this link, or Amazon, or your Kindle device. Using the book page on Packt Publishing website you can also check the table of contents and the sample chapter.

This the third my plugin I ported to Redmine 2.0 and the first plugin I ported to Redmine 2.1. Unfortunately, the delay between this release and WikiNG release (the previous port to Redmine 2.0) was still big as I got very busy, then had a vocation, then found difficulties in implementing extended fields under Rails 3 and then got to port for Redmine 2.1, which switches to jQuery...

• Vitaly Klimov discovered that issues grouping by custom fields got broken after installing this plugin... Vitaly also made research of the issue, what helped me much! Thanks, Vitaly! The new version does grouping by custom fields just fine! See #2015.
• V.E.O. discovered that you can’t export issues listing to PDF with any extended column enabled! But it’s not the case anymore with this new release. See #2023.

As Redmine 1.4.x introduced multiple repositories support I also did some modifications to reflect these changes... In particular, I added the “Repositories” extended column, which show the number of repositories in the project. Besides I added two other extended columns: “Forums”, which shows the number of forums in the project, and “Forum messages”, which shows the number of messages in all project forums.

This version also comes with the Turkish translation, thanks to Ismail Sezen!

Did you wonder how does one know, when new Redmine version is released?.. I get to know this, usually, by checking #redmine tag in Twitter... How can you know when new Extended Fields is released?.. You can: a) Follow me on Twitter, b) Subscribe to the news feed which is available under the News tab and... c) Oh, yes! You can subscribe to the Extended Fields project using the subscription form on the sidebar! There you can choose what types of notifications you want to receive (down to notifications about commits). This functionality is provided by my Subscription plugin, which has not been released yet.

P.S. What plugin is the next?.. And the next plugin is... Extended Profile!

Ok, I ask my users for a company they work in (using Extended Profile plugin which uses Extended Fields)... But how do I see what they answer?.. No, really? Of course, I can check profiles. But, hey, right now I have around 150 active (in terms of Redmine) users’ profiles to check!.. Honestly – my opinion is that custom fields are useless unless you can easily list them...

The same applies not only to custom fields. I always wondered how can I list projects and their download counts. Even used SQL to do that! Even planned to write a plugin for this (see #1745)... But I found the workaround! And it became the main feature of the Extended Fields plugin version 0.1.0!

So now the Extended Fields plugin extends... listings! In partucular – users listing and projects listing which are available for administrators. The plugin adds customization to these listings by allowing to specify which columns and/or custom fields to show (like it is already done for issues listing). Besides just columns the plugin also adds special columns allowing to show calculated data (that’s how I get download counts)...

As a part of The Rename the identifier of the project has been renamed to extended-fields with this release! Most users won’t feel the change! Only those who use SVN. SVN users will need to execute the following command to fix their repositories:

$ svn switch --relocate http://svn.s-andy.com/redmine-fields http://svn.s-andy.com/extended-fields

All users should also consider subscribing to the project using the form (on the sidebar) provided by my new Subscription plugin (which suffer testing right now – that is by subscribing you also help me testing it). Why subscribing? For example, being subscribed you would get notification about this release and this news...

P.S. I thought about changing plugin name to something what reflects new features as Extended Fields name does not tell anything about listings... But what name? Extended Fields & Listings?.. Extended Columns?.. Maybe Extended Redmine? Well... Fields are related to listings and columns! So decided to leave its current name.

The idea to write the Extended Fields plugin came to me when I was analyzing issues with the Extended Profile plugin (that’s why the name is so similar).

The Extended Profile plugin adds many new fields to user profile. Actually the same can be done using just custom fields but unlike custom fields the extended profile fields support “richer” content - links, social usernames which are made links to the social networks when displayed, projects displayed as links etc. Core custom fields cannot be used this way! So that’s why I wrote the Extended Profile plugin... But later I faced many issues related to the approach I chose. Some users wanted more fields, other users wanted less fields... Some functions conflicted with other plugins... I personally wanted more flexibility!..

When disputing with Daniel Seifert (see #1876) I came to the conclusion that the whole approach was wrong! Instead of adding new fields to user profile I should extend custom fields - to add support for new types, to give more control over displaying etc. Other things which were missing and hard to implement in the Extended Profile plugin were already implemented for custom fields e.g. visibility control, position etc.

So this was the story!.. Now meet the plugin! The Extended Fields plugin has the following features:

• Adds new custom field types:
  • Wiki text (can contain Textile code which is converted to HTML when displayed);
  • Link (hypertext link);
  • Project (shown as a project link).
• Adds new properties to custom fields:
  • Hint (adds specified text below the form element);
  • On registration flag for user custom fields (specifies whether the custom field should be asked on registration).
• Adds the possibility to customize how custom fields are rendered by specifying template files for custom fields and custom field formats;
• Improved the custom field form by changing the text field for the “Default value” of the “Text” type to the text area.

For more details on features check this Wiki page...