AgileTrack Version 0.8c Released

This release contains a couple major new features. First is the ability to have email notifications sent in response to events on issues, projects, iterations, and releases, and second is the initial integration of the Lucene search engine.

Email notifications involve a few parts. First, the feature needs to be enabled by going to the System Configuration and enabling the "Email Notifications" feature. Then users need to be allowed to subscribe to changes on records. Users are able to subscribe to changes on specific records only if they have been given the correct permission. To grant the permission to subscribe for email notifications to a user, edit the appropriate role and make sure it allows Creating, Loading, Saving, and Deleting "Own Subscriptions". When the permission is available, there will be a "Subscribe" button available when viewing open records.

Next, notification message templates must be created which specify what the content of each notification may be. System administrators need to enable the message templates tab in the same way the Roles tab is enabled. In the Messages tab, message templates can be defined. Each message template can specify the subject and content of the email message, as well as the event conditions that trigger the email. The subject and content can use special tags to merge in record data when generating the email messages. For example if the subject is defined to be "Comment added to ${NAME}", then at the time the message is generated, ${NAME} will be replaced with the title or name of the record which triggered the notification. Some other useful tags include ISSUE_NAME, ISSUE_DESCRIPTION, PROJECT_NAME, DESCRIPTION, ID, TYPE, and COMMENT. The conditions which trigger the notification are fairly simple to understand. Simply select the record types and the events which cause the email notification. The a record is changed that matches one of the types and one of the events for the message template, that will cause the notification to be sent to all subscribers.

Notifications can only be processed in an environment that uses the AgileTrack Server. The server has a new configuration section for defining the email server information so that notifications can be processed. Just add the following section to the agiletrack.conf file on the server.

        \[SMTP\]
        smtp-host = mail.myhost.com
        smtp-user = myuser
        smtp-password = mypass

The Lucene search engine is being used to index a number of records right now. The interface currently only allows full-text searches on issues (with comments), but the potential is there to search projects and releases as well. To use the new search engine, just enter the search text in the text field of the Issues tab. The query syntax is just the default Lucene query syntax which I won't describe in detail, but it is useful to know that wildcard searches can be done in the form "word*", "w??d", etc. The search results should come up very quickly. The index is updated each time a record is saved and I don't know what kinds of performance issues that might cause. So far I haven't noticed any problems in my own testing, but time will tell. Please report any problems.

Other changes include:

* Combo-boxes have been made larger to accomodate large project lists.
* The animated timer icon has been replaced by a simple icon that shows time logged on the issue being timed.
* Issue tooltips now include the description.
* Calendars now highlight the current date.
* A change has been made that should make the interface more functional under OS X (please report success on this).
* Some small but fixes.

Remember that email notifications require the AgileTrack Server which is available from agiletrack.net. To use the client with the server, the client must have the JSON-RPC or XML-RPC interface extension installed separately. They extensions can also be found in the download section of agiletrack.net. For support, please use the forums.