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Review Board 2.0 Release Notes

Release date: May 19, 2014

This release contains all bug fixes and features found in Review Board version 1.7.25.

Security Improvements

  • Added improved CSRF protection to all our forms.

A Note on ALLOWED_HOSTS

As of Django 1.5.x, the ALLOWED_HOSTS setting is required. This setting is used to work around a handful of host poisoning attacks.

By default, Review Board will set this to '*', which disables this security check. We recommend setting this in your settings_local.py file (in your site’s conf directory). For more information, see Django’s ALLOWED_HOSTS documentation.

Compatibility Changes

Server-Side and Deployment Changes

  • Django 1.6

    This is the first release to require Django 1.6. This release is not compatible with earlier versions of Django, or tested to be compatible with Django 1.7 or newer.

  • Dropped Python 2.5 support.

    We no longer support Python 2.5 deployments. Python 2.6 or 2.7 is required both by Review Board 2.0 and Django 1.6.

    Theoretically this release is also compatible with Python 3.2+, but it has not been well tested, and many dependencies (such as SCM integrations) may not yet be available with Python 3.x.

  • Haystack based full-text search.

    The old and often broken PyLucene search backend has been removed. It’s been replaced with a new search using Haystack and Whoosh. These are pure-Python and should make search much easier to set up.

    Note that an existing PyLucene install will no longer be used. The new search should work automatically, though, after doing a full re-index.

    Patch by Edward Lee.

  • Added support for Pillow.

    Pillow is a replacement for PIL. It’s better maintained and easier to install. While not yet required, we recommend upgrading to it sooner rather than later. We may require it in a future release.

    You will need to uninstall PIL in order to install Pillow. See the Pillow documentation for more information.

  • Subvertpy is now supported as an alternative to PySVN. This can often be easier to install than PySVN. We welcome any feedback and bug reports, as this is quite new.

    Patch by Mark Lee.

New User Features

Diff Viewer

Indentation Markers in Diffs

In order to simplify reviews, the diff viewer has traditionally treated lines with only indentation changes as being equal. This was often helpful, but it meant that it wasn’t always obvious that a line’s indentation had changed.

The diff viewer now shows indentation changes, and differentiates between spaces and tabs. The lines are still shown as equals, to keep the diffs clean, but it’s now easy to tell at a glance what indentation changes were made to a file.

This is especially important for languages that use whitespace for blocks, such as Python.

../_images/2.0-diff-indentation.png

New File Index

The index of files at the top of the diff viewer has been rebuilt from the ground up. In addition to just giving a list of filenames and links to the changed chunks, the new index shows:

  • A graph on the left which shows the ratio of added/changed/deleted lines. The thickness of this graph indicates what percentage of the file has been altered.

  • Whether files have been renamed, and the old filename if so.

  • Indications for deleted or binary files.

  • A list of clickable chunk dots, color-coded to represent add/change/delete.

../_images/2.0-diff-file-index.png

New Diff Revision Selector

The interface for choosing which diff revision or set of interdiff revisions to view has changed. The new design is more compact, and is much easier to understand. The new revision selector allows viewing both individual revisions (by selecting orig and the desired revision), and viewing interdiffs (by selecting the two revisions to compare).

../_images/2.0-diff-revision-selector.png

Reload-Free Navigation

As part of the new revision selector, switching between diff revisions, interdiffs, and across pages of a large diff will occur without reloading the entire page.

Visual Design Refresh

We’ve refreshed the visual design of the diff viewer, tweaking many of the colors to dramatically improve readability. In addition, several small bugs with alignment and spacing of various pieces of the diff view have been fixed across all major browsers.

Interdiff Improvements

Interdiffs could become a mess after syncing a development tree and posting a new diff. They would show changes from the sync that were unrelated to the posted change.

The diff viewer will now do its best to filter out any changes that weren’t part of the uploaded diff files.

Bug #311

Moved-Lines Detection Improvements

The algorithm for detecting moved lines within a diff file has been dramatically improved. The new algorithm has several improvements:

  • Blank lines are now included in the moved blocks, instead of treated as two separate moves.

  • Adjacent but different move regions didn’t work properly, showing only the first moved region (unless there was at least one line in between them). Now any regions anywhere work, in any order.

  • Only insert/delete lines were considered for moves, which was a problem when moving some functions that resulted in replace lines (such as when one function was replaced by another). Now replace lines are factored in.

The flag indicating a moved block has also been redesigned to be cleaner and easier to read. Instead of flagging each and every line, only the first line is flagged, with a “flagpole” across the rest of the block.

Improved Rendering for New Files

Newly-added files would show empty line number and code columns for the left-hand side of the diff (where the original version of the file would normally go). These have been removed, and new files now take up the entire width of the box.

Easy File Downloads

Files shown in the diff viewer can now be downloaded in their raw, original form. A download icon is shown alongside the revision of each file. This makes it easy to fetch either the original or modified version of any file up for review.

Bug #1434

../_images/2.0-diff-download.png

Other Diff Viewer Features

  • Added a keyboard shortcut (r/R) to comment on the selected chunk in the diff viewer. (Bug #44)

    Patch by Edwin Zhang.

“New Review Request” UI

The “New Review Request” page has been completely re-done, with many new features and capabilities.

../_images/2.0-new-review-request_thumb.png

Post-Commit Review Requests

One of the most requested features over the past few years has been the ability to create review requests for committed changes from the web UI. Until now, doing this has required using RBTools from the command-line.

For repositories which support it, the “New Review Request” page now has a list of the committed changes, ordered from newest to oldest. This can be browsed by branch. Clicking on a commit will download the diff and change description from the repository and create a new review request.

This is currently implemented for GitHub and Subversion repositories. Support for other services and repository types will be coming in future releases.

Bug #100

Simplified Pre-Commit Workflow

The workflow for creating new pre-commit review requests through the web UI has also been reworked and simplified. This will now guide users through the process, asking for additional input only when necessary. In most cases, the workflow is now as simple as dragging a diff file onto the page.

Better Validation and Errors

When uploading diffs through the web UI, more checking is done to ensure correctness before creating the review request. In particular, a common error case with Git repositories and diffs with abbreviated indexes will now produce a useful error message during review request creation instead of failing at the diff display stage.

Review Requests

Visual Design Refresh

  • The layout of the information for review requests has been redesigned. There are now two columns. The summary, description, and testing fields are on the left, and all the other information is on the right.

    This simplifies the view, shows more of the important information at a glance, fixes up some confusing nesting issues, and will allow extensions to add new fields.

  • File attachment thumbnails no longer appear scattered. They have a consistent look and size. Long filenames and captions are ellipsized, and the delete and pencil icons are now in consistent places.

    The thumbnails now do a nicer job rendering the contents. Text files in particular now have a better preview. The text contents are syntax-highlighted in the thumbnail.

Markdown for Text Fields

Many of the multi-line text fields in Review Board (review request description and testing done, comments, replies, and close description) now support using Markdown. This allows you to add some structure and rich formatting to your comments. The basic Markdown syntax is available, as well as a few extensions such as GitHub’s “fenced code blocks” and tables.

Most notably, it’s now possible to embed syntax-highlighted code samples or images into your comments. See the user manual for more information on how to use Markdown.

See Using Markdown for a primer on the supported syntax.

Based on work by Greg Wang. (Bug #2093, Bug #2098)

Detailed Change Descriptions

The “review request changed” boxes provided only basic information on what changed when publishing a draft of a review request. It wasn’t very helpful when uploading new file attachments or when changing a long description.

This has been fully rewritten to be much more useful:

  • The Description and Testing Done changes are now shown as a diff, making it very easy to see what parts of the text has changed.

    Any Markdown formatting is also rendered in the diff view.

    (Bug #2045)

    ../_images/2.0-changedescs-diffed-text.png
  • Added or removed file attachments are shown with their thumbnails.

    The thumbnails in the change description box include a Review or New Comment link, to allow jumping directly to the review UI without needing to find the matching thumbnail at the top of the page.

    This also helps when you want to see older file attachments that have since been removed.

    ../_images/2.0-changedescs-attachments.png
  • More information is shown about the contents of new diffs.

    The total number of added or removed lines are shown alongside the diff revision, making it easy to see just how big the change is.

    A file listing is also shown for the diff, along with the same icons now used in the diff viewer to show the complexity of the changes made to the files.

    ../_images/2.0-changedescs-diffs.png
  • The other fields, like Branch and Depends On, are shown in a way that makes it much easier to see what has changed.

    Some of the fields also show more information than they used to. Depends On, for example, now shows the summaries of the review requests.

Custom fields provided by extensions will benefit from these updates as well, and can also take advantage of the new API to customize how the updates are displayed.

Changing Issue Status

Issues can now be marked as fixed or dropped and reopened by the user who created the comment, in addition to the owner of the review request.

Based on work by Niklas Hambuechen. (Bug #2713, Bug #2888)

Other Review Request Features

  • Expand collapsed reviews when jumping to issues from the summary table.

    When clicking on issues in the issue table, if the containing review was collapsed, it will now be opened before jumping to it.

    Patches by Hiroki Gohara and Yazan Medanat. (Bug #3770)

  • Added “Last Diff” timestamp to review requests.

    This change adds an additional timestamp to the top of the review request to show the timestamp of the most recent diff update.

    Patch by Vlad Safronov.

  • The Depends On field now shows a strikethrough for dependencies that have been closed. (Bug #3200)

    Patch by Olessia Karpova.

  • Interdiff link on the draft banner. (Bug #3189)

    When uploading a new diff to an existing review request, the draft banner will now show a Show changes link that will take you to an interdiff between the last published diff and the newly uploaded diff.

    Patch by Tomi Äijö.

Dashboard

Bulk Close for Review Requests

There’s a new column available in the dashboard that provides a checkbox for selecting rows of review requests. This allows for selecting one or more review requests and closing them, right from the dashboard.

This is particularly useful for administrators, or users with close privileges, to clean up review requests left open by other users.

You can find the new column by clicking the pencil icon on the upper-right of the dashboard.

Bug #579

Better Issue and Ship-It Tracking

If there are any open issues remaining on a review request, they will be shown in place of the Ship It count in the dashboard. Any Ship Its issued on the review request will remain hidden until all issues are resolved.

This makes it easier to see what work still remains at a glance, and to give a better idea if a Ship It really means Ship It.

../_images/2.0-dashboard-issue-status.png

Improved Dashboard Sidebar

The dashboard sidebar is now better organized, neatly categorizing items under Incoming and Outgoing sections. There’s no longer a bunch of bold items that double as links and sections.

The current dashboard view is also highlighted, making it easier to see what you’re looking at.

../_images/2.0-dashboard-sidebar.png

Other Dashboard Features

  • There’s a better set of default dashboard columns for new users. These are, in order:

    • Select Rows

    • New Updates

    • Ship It!

    • My Comments

    • Summary

    • Submitter

    • Last Updated (Relative)

    Existing users won’t see their columns change. If they want to use the new columns, they can click the pencil on the top-right of the dashboard and customize their columns.

  • Added a Diff Size column to the dashboard, which shows the number of inserted and deleted lines in the uploaded patch. (Bug #48)

  • Submitted review requests are now included in the Starred Reviews page of the Dashboard.

    Previously, any review requests that a user had starred would be removed from this page as soon as the request was closed. Submitted and discarded review requests are now included in this page along with open ones.

    Patch by Mary Elaine Malit. (Bug #1075)

  • Discarded review requests are now shown in the All Review Requests page. (Bug #576)

  • The dashboard frame now takes up the full page size, instead of fitting the content and possibly scrolling parts off the page.

Review UIs

Generic Text Review

Text files attached to review requests can now be reviewed just like a diff. Their contents will be syntax-highlighted when possible, allowing for easier review of standalone snippets of code, SQL data dumps, XML files, or anything else.

Comments can be made on single lines, or they can span multiple lines. Any commented lines will appear along with the comment in the review.

Bug #1702

Markdown Review UI

Markdown files uploaded as file attachments can now be reviewed in detail. The uploaded file will display both the source text and the rendered HTML. Comments can be added to either the source or rendered result, and the corresponding lines will appear in the review.

Based on work by Aamir Mansoor.

Visual Design Refresh

Review UIs now look a lot cleaner and more compact. In previous releases, a mostly empty review request box would appear above the review UI, taking up valuable space. This has been removed, providing more focus on the text, image, or PDF being reviewed.

Reviews

Better Issue and Ship-It Tracking

Similar to the changes to the “Ship it!” column in the dashboard, improvements were also made for reviews. Now, if a reviewer marks Ship It and opens issues, the “Ship It!” will be replaced by “Fix it, then Ship it!” until all the issues are closed. Once the last issue is closed, it will update to “Ship It!”

Thumbnails in the Review Dialog

File attachment comment thumbnails (like image excerpts) are now shown in the “Edit Review” dialog.

When opening the Review dialog (either through the top-level Review action or the Edit Review button on the banner), any comments on file attachments will show the comment thumbnail along with the comment text (for example, the selected region of an image). This more closely mirrors what the review will look like once published.

New “My Account” page

The My Account page has been completely rewritten. The original was from the very first few months of Review Board, and was long overdue due for a replacement.

The new page makes it easy to search for groups and join them and to manage your settings and your profile.

Extensions can add new sections to the My Account page, or add to existing sections, in order to provide user customization of an extension.

../_images/2.0-my-account.png

Other User Features

  • Review request “approval” state.

    Review Board tries hard not to dictate workflows for developers and companies, but to instead provide a solid platform for existing workflows. Many companies or individual teams have their own policies for when a review request is approved.

    We’re now providing a way through the API and extensions to determine if a review request is approved. Approval logic can be provided by an extension, and then used in repository hooks or other scripts.

    By default, the logic marks a review request as approved if it has at least one Ship It!, and no open issues. This can be augmented or completely replaced.

    The Review Board web UI does not indicate approval or enforce any actions based on approval, so by default, nothing really changes. This is more for those companies that are adding their own deeper integration or policy enforcement.

    For more information on this, see the approval entries in the WebAPI and Extensions section of this document.

  • High-DPI display support for icons, graphs, and thumbnails.

    Continuing our work on supporting high-DPI (“retina”) screens such as phones, tablets, and some newer laptops, we’ve added high-resolution artwork for all the icons throughout the UI. In addition, the graphs in the admin site and thumbnails for uploaded image attachments will be shown in high resolution if appropriate.

  • Visual design refresh of the login and registration pages.

    The user login and registration pages were looking pretty outdated. The redesign makes them much prettier, and extensible!

    We’ll be announcing some new extensions in the future that take advantage of the redesign to allow for logging in with services like GitHub and Google.

  • Public local sites can now be accessed by anonymous users.

  • Improved the look of generated e-mails.

New Administration Features

Security Checklist

There’s a new Security Checklist page under System Information on the side of the administration UI. This will run through a series of tests and see if there are any immediate problems you need to solve to tighten security on your Review Board installation.

Over time, we’ll add more checks to this. For now, it tests for your ALLOWED_HOSTS setting and for security problems with file attachments.

Patch by Allisa Schmidt.

New Manage Extensions Page

The Manage Extensions page has been rewritten with the following features:

  • Provides visual hints for enabled, disabled, and broken extensions.

  • Extensions can be dynamically enabled or disabled without reloading the page.

  • A new Scan for new extensions button updates the list of known extensions.

  • When an extension fails to load, the error and traceback are shown with the extension, to help with debugging.

condensediffs Management Command

A new management command has been introduced to squash duplicate diff data in the database. This can often result in a 50% or greater reduction in the size of the diff tables.

To run the command, type:

$ rb-site manage /path/to/site condensediffs

This may take some time, but you can continue to use Review Board while this is working. A maintenance window is not required. It may, however, slow down access to the database while working.

Better Feedback on Admin Changes

When saving or otherwise modifying a database entry, or performing some other action in the administration UI, you will now see a message confirming what you did.

Note that the first time you view the administration UI, you may see many messages from previous actions prior to the upgrade. This will only happen once, and can be ignored.

New LDAP Configuration UI

The LDAP configuration page was very confusing, using some unusual terms and presenting things in strange orders. This has been rewritten to prevent many of the issues that users encountered.

Patch by Stephen Gallagher.

Bug #3004

Admin Widget Reordering

The widgets in the administration dashboard can now be reordered through drag-and-drop. This allows admins to choose which widgets they want to see near the top of the page, and which they want to keep further down.

This is the first step toward customization of the administration UI. In future releases, administrators will be able to add or remove widgets, and extensions will be able to provide new widgets.

Patch by Stephanie Su.

Option to Disable Gravatars

The Gravatars shown in the top header bar, user infobox, and user page’s sidebar can now be disabled through a Use Gravatar images setting in the General Settings page.

This is useful for environments that are locked down and don’t allow access to the Internet.

Bug #3030

Management Commands for Extensions

Three new rb-site manage commands have been added to manage the list of enabled extensions: list-extensions, enable-extension, and disable-extension.

list-extensions will list all the extensions that Review Board currently knows about, as well as their enabled states.

enable-extension and disable-extension take an extension ID and can enable or disable the given extension, which is helpful when an extension has broken the installation.

Experimental Web Hooks

We are testing new post-receive webhooks for Beanstalk, BitBucket, GitHub, and Google Code, which we’ll expand upon in upcoming releases.

This webhook can be used to close review requests referenced in pushed commits. To use this, you’ll need to add a webhook to your repository at your hosting provider and provide a URL.

This URL is in the form of http://<server>/repos/<repo_id>/<service>/hooks/close-submitted/, where repo_id is the numeric ID of your repository (available in the administration UI), and service is the ID of the hosting service (beanstalk, bitbucket, github, or googlecode).

(If you’re using GitHub, make sure you choose to send a JSON payload.)

Note that this requires your server be reachable over the Internet by the hosting provider’s servers.

The hook will then look for all commits with a matching Commit ID field, as well as commit messages that contain:

Reviewed at http://<server>/r/<id>/

or:

Review request #<id>

If found, the review request will be closed with a reference to the committed revisions and branches.

For now, this feature is considered experimental, and is not referenced in the documentation. Future versions will introduce hooks for additional services, and improve the setup process.

Patches by Anselina Chia and Bhushan Ramnani.

Other Administration Features

  • Added an option for choosing whether to set the Auto-Submitted: auto-generated e-mail header. (Bug #2646)

    Some mailing lists filter out e-mails that contain the Auto-Submitted: auto-generated header. This new setting allows the header to be disabled. By default, the header is included for e-mails.

    Patch by Anselina Chia.

  • Review groups now allow setting multiple mailing lists, separated by commas. (Bug #1661)

  • Simpler installs

    rb-site install has a new stream-lined installation experience. It now asks fewer questions, focusing on handling common installations using Apache, mod_wsgi, and memcached. This reduces the number of questions you have to answer.

    Passing --advanced will cause all original questions to be presented.

Web API Changes

visible Attribute For Repository Resources

The Repository resource now allows you to get and set the visible attribute on repositories, which controls whether or not the repository is listed in the “New Review Request” page. Additionally, the Repository List resource has a new parameter, show-invisible, which can be set to 1 to get a list of all repositories, including those which are not visible.

New Repository Branches and Repository Commits Resources

The Repository Branches and Repository Commits resources are special list resources that allow you to fetch a list of branches or a commit log for supported repositories. These are used for the post-commit review request UI.

Draft Diff Resources

In order to make resources more consistent, diffs that are attached to a draft now have a separate resource. This provides the same interface as the diff resource, with the exception that there’s always a maximum of a single diff attached to a draft.

File Attachments For Diffs

As part of a continuing effort to support reviewing binary files as part of a change, a new resource exists for associating file attachments with file diffs.

Diff Validation Resource

A new resource has been added to verify diff files before creating review requests. The new Diff Validation resource allows you to POST the same data that you would to the Review Request List resource, but instead of creating a new object, it will either return an OK or a detailed error message explaining what is wrong with the posted diff.

Support for Markdown Fields

  • Added support for forcing Markdown-capable text fields to show Markdown or plain text.

    Fields such as a review request’s description or testing done may be in either Markdown or text format. Clients can now specify which they want to receive by passing ?force-text-type=. Valid arguments are markdown or plain.

    When using markdown, all Markdown-capable fields will be provided as valid Markdown, escaping the text if necessary.

    When using plain, all Markdown-capable fields will be provided as plain text, unescaping if necessary. Any Markdown syntax (such as for links) will remain as-is.

  • Added a text_type field for Markdown-capable resources.

    text_type shows the type of text used for all Markdown-capable fields in that resource. This will be either markdown or plain.

    If using ?force-text-type=, this will reflect the type provided.

  • Added a text.markdown capability.

    Server Info Resource now lists text.markdown: true in the capabilities list, allowing clients to make smart decisions up-front about Markdown support.

Extra Data for Resources

Added support for accessing and manipulating extra data for many resources.

Various resources now support attaching and accessing extra custom data through the API. By setting extra_data.custom_key=custom_value in a request, the caller can set a custom_key that can later be accessed when retrieving the resource.

Extensions can also make use of this data.

The following resources support attaching extra data:

Other Web API Changes

  • Added an absolute_url field to various web API resources.

    This field contains an absolute URL to the user-facing page that the content represents.

    This is available for the various file attachment and screenshot resources, Review Group Resource, and Review Request Resource.

    Patch by Edward Lee.

  • Added fields for indicating approval on a review request.

    Review Request Resource now has approved and approval_failure fields that indicate whether the review request has been approved and, if not, what the failure was, respectively.

    These can be used by scripts or repository hooks to, for example, display a list of changes that can be committed, or to prevent committing a change if it isn’t approved.

    See the description on approval above for more information.

  • Added fields for getting the issue counts and number of Ship Its on a review request.

    This provides issue_open_count, issue_dropped_count, issue_resolved_count, and ship_it_count fields on Review Request Resource.

  • Added querying for review requests based on issue counts and Ship Its.

    This supports a variety of new query arguments for finding review requests based on the number of open, dropped, or resolved issues. These are in the form of ?issue-open-count=, ?issue-dropped-count=, ?issue-resolved-count=, and ?ship-it-count=.

    It’s also possible to query with ranges by appending -lt, -lte, -gt or -gte to the query parameter name.

    This only works for review requests that have otherwise been created or accessed since upgrading to this release, since the query counts are only generated on-demand.

  • The root resource now provides the server information and capabilities.

    Clients can now check the Root List Resource for this information, instead of having to access the Server Info Resource. Both resources provide the same data.

  • Users can now add or remove themselves to or from review groups through the API.

    A user can POST or DELETE their own username to Review Group User Resource in order to change their membership in the group. Previously, this ability was limited to administrators.

  • File Diff Resource now provides information on various stats for the diff, if the diff has been rendered at least once. These will appear in extra_data.

    These include the raw insert/delete line counts from the patch file (raw_insert_count, raw_delete_count), the processed insert/delete/replace/equal line counts from the processed file (insert_count, delete_count, replace_count, equal_count), and the total number of lines in the file (total_line_count).

    The raw insert/delete counts will be there for any uploaded patch.

  • Diff List Resource no longer thinks it can create diffs on review request without a repository.

    Attempting to create a diff on an attachments-only review request would result in an HTTP 500. It now returns an Invalid Attribute error.

  • Fixed a breakage when encountering errors looking up users in authentication backends.

    Patch by Crystal Lok Koo.

  • Clarification of the issue_status field in the API when issue_opened is False. (Bug #2984)

    When a comment was modified through the API to remove the issue_opened bit, it would leave things in an inconsistent state where the issue_status was still set to open instead of null.

Extensions

Extension Static Media

Extensions can now define a list of JavaScript and CSS/LESS files into one or more bundles, listed in the extension class’s css_bundles or js_bundles attributes.

When running in a development environment, the files will be included directly into the pages. When building a package, these bundles will be compiled and minified.

Bundled static media will also be re-extracted when extensions are upgraded, which prevents the need to disable and re-enable extensions when upgrading.

Per-Page Static Media Bundles

Static media bundles (defined by css_bundles and js_bundles on an Extension) can be applied to specific pages by specifying an apply_to field in the bundle definition. This field takes a list of URL names that the bundle should be loaded on. It works like the default bundle in that the bundles don’t have to be manually loaded in a template.

Pre-Defined URL Name Lists

There’s now a few useful lists of URL names that an extension can import that can be used for any apply_to fields, to help ensure hooks or static media bundles apply to the necessary pages.

This includes diffviewer_url_names, reviewable_url_names and review_request_url_names, which can be imported from reviewboard.urls.

LessCSS Files

  • Built-in constants

    Any .less file can now make use of @RB_MAJOR_VERSION, @RB_MINOR_VERSION, @RB_MICRO_VERSION, @RB_PATCH_VERSION, @RB_IS_RELEASED, @DEBUG, and @STATIC_ROOT macros.

    These are useful in LessCSS macro guards when you may need to alter a rule depending on the version of Review Board or whether it’s a production install.

    Extensions can also use @STATIC_ROOT as the base path for loading in definition files provided by Review Board. For example, @{STATIC_ROOT}/rb/css/defs.less.

    These apply to extensions when running in development mode and or when packaging the extension.

  • Bundled definitions

    LessCSS files can now import @{STATIC_ROOT}/rb/css/defs.less, which provides a number of definitions and macros to help match the style of Review Board.

Media Packaging

  • Source media files (JavaScript, CSS, and LessCSS) can now be removed from built extension packages.

    This behavior can be triggered by adding the following to the package’s setup.cfg:

    [build_static_files]
    remove_source_files = 1
    

JavaScript Extensions

Review Board 2.0 adds the beginning of JavaScript extensions, which are a counterpart to standard Review Board extensions. They can be used to hook into parts of the JavaScript codebase in a clean way to augment UI or react to events.

JavaScript extensions are specified by defining a JSExtension subclass. JSExtension contains attributes for model_class (equivalent to the old js_model_class), and apply_to, which allows the extension to be initialized only on the pages with the given URL names.

One or more JavaScript extensions can be provided by setting the list of subclasses in Extension.js_extensions.

Currently, there are two hooks: One for interfacing with the comment dialog, and one for adding additional elements to comments in the review dialog. More will come in future releases.

Sandboxing

New Hooks

AccountPagesHook and AccountPageFormsHook

Extensions can add to the new My Account page through the new AccountPagesHook and AccountPageFormsHook. These create new page sections in the My Account page and add to existing page sections, respectively. See the documentation for more information on using these.

AuthBackendHook

The new AuthBackendHook allows extensions to provide new authentication backends. These will be available in the list of authentication backends that the administrator can choose from. This is now the preferred way of adding custom authentication backends, rather than using Python entrypoints.

The auth backend will be registered when the extension is enabled, and unregistered when disabled.

See the documentation for information on using this.

DashboardColumnsHook

Extensions can add new columns to the dashboard and to other datagrids using the new DashboardColumnsHook. These can be used to display custom information on each row of the dashboard, using, for example, custom data stored on a review request by the extension.

DashboardSidebarItemsHook

The old DashboardHook has been replaced by DashboardSidebarItemsHook, which offers an improved way of adding content to the dashboard’s sidebar.

Instead of only supporting links to URLs, this can support content of any type by making use of extensible subclasses of rb2.0:reviewboard.datagrids.sidebar.BaseSidebarItem. We provide built-in classes for named sections (rb2.0:reviewboard.datagrids.sidebar.BaseSidebarSection) and links (rb2.0:reviewboard.datagrids.sidebar.SidebarNavItem). New subclasses can be written for rendering any custom template.

Field and FieldSets

Extensions can now add additional fields and groups of fields to review requests through ReviewRequestFieldsHook and ReviewRequestFieldSetsHook. See the documentation for more information on using these.

Custom fields will have their contents saved and published along with drafts. They will also be shown in the “Review request changed” boxes. Fields can provide custom rendering for their changed in these boxes if they need to.

ReviewRequestApprovalHook

Companies that need to define their own approval logic can subclass ReviewRequestApprovalHook and implement the is_approved() method to calculate if the provided review request is approved. This value will be reflected in the API, and will be accessible to any extensions that want to operate on approval.

SignalHook

Extensions that need to listen to signals can now use SignalHook instead of managing their own signal connections.

SignalHook takes the signal and a callback as arguments, and an optional sender. It will then connect to that signal, and disconnect when shutting down the extension.

Template Hooks for Login and Registration Pages

There are new before-login-form, after-login-form, before-register-form, and after-register-form template hooks that can be used to render content before or after the login or registration forms. This can be used to provide further instructions or other options.

UserPageSidebarItemsHook

A new extension hook has been added for adding links to the sidebar on the user page (/users/<username>/). UserPageSidebarItemsHook is just like the new dashboard sidebar hooks listed above, but targeted for the user page instead.

Authentication Backend Changes

Custom Login Instructions

Any custom authentication backend can now set login_instructions to the text to display on the login page. Installations that need something beyond the default instructions can subclass their preferred authentication backend and override these.

Populating Users on API Lookup

An AuthBackend.query_users() method was added, which can populate the database based on a user lookup query.

This is called when querying User List Resource before any results are returned from the database. This can be used to query a backend server or database to fetch any matching users and store them in the database.

Extensions can raise a UserQueryError if this fails, which will be reflected in the web API through 226 - User Query Error.

Patches by Mark Côté.

Custom User Filtering

An AuthBackend.search_users() method was added, which is called when querying a list of users using the API. This function can override the query to perform a lookup with the provided query string in whatever way is most appropriate for the backend.

This can be used, for example, to filter out users not matching certain criteria, or to change which fields are matched.

Patch by Mark Côté.

Other Extensibility Changes

New Initialize Method

Instead of overriding Extension.__init__() and passing arguments to the parent method, extensions can now simply override initialize(). This doesn’t take any arguments, and there’s no need to call the parent method.

This means instead of this:

class MyExtension(Extension):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(MyExtension, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

        # Initialization here

You can just do this:

class MyExtension(Extension):
    def initialize(self):
        # Initialization here

New extra_data Fields

extra_data fields have been added to DiffSet, DiffSetHistory, FileDiff, Group, Review, ReviewRequest, and ReviewRequestDraft.

These fields accept structured Python data and serialize it to JSON. They accompany the existing extra_data fields on Profile and Repository.

Extensions can now store state on any of these objects for later use. The values can also be accessed and manipulated through the API. See Extra Data for Resources.

New Signals

  • There are two new signals that can be used by extensions to operate when settings have been changed.

    • site_settings_loaded signal (provided by rb2.0:reviewboard.signals) is emitted after Review Board loads its settings.

    • settings_saved (provided by djblets.extensions.signals) is emitted for an extension when its settings have been saved.

  • Added review_request_publishing, review_publishing, and reply_publishing signals.

    These signals are emitted before the publishing process starts on review requests, reviews, and replies. Extensions can connect to these to perform pre-publish validation. They can raise a PublishError to abort the publish.

    The error message provided to PublishError will be reflected in the API’s error message.

    Patch by Mark Côté.

Access to Extension Instances

Extension code often needed to access the instance of the extension, but that instance wasn’t always immediately available. That meant that they’d have to jump through hoops, querying for the extension using the extension manager.

Extensions can now access an instance attribute on their Extension subclass, which will point to the running instance of the extension. This will be None if the extension is not enabled.

SettingsForm.settings

Subclasses of SettingsForm can now access a settings attribute, which points to the extension’s settings. This is useful for custom load() and save() methods that need to access the settings in some way.

Custom Context Processors

Extensions can now provide custom Django context processors, which will add variables to all rendered templates. This is useful when you need to provide data to pages not directly rendered by an extension, such as the login page.

Extra Context for TemplateHook

TemplateHook now accepts an extra_context argument that can be used to populate the template with custom variables.

TemplateHook subclasses can also implement get_extra_data() to dynamically generate data for the template. Previously, they had to override render_to_string() to provide any custom data.

Improvements to Configuration Pages

Configuration pages for an extension can now use the Django admin widgets that are normally reserved for forms in the Django administration UI. These contain useful widgets such as SplitDateTimeWidget and the side-by-side, filterable lists of items.

Miscellaneous Changes

  • Moved the base-after-navbar template hook.

    This has now been moved to right after the navbar, instead of further down the page, allowing extensions to provide new UI immediately below the navbar.

  • Custom middleware can now take an optional extension parameter.

Removed Features

  • rb-site install no longer provides a graphical interface when run on Linux desktops. This was removed to provide consistency and attention around the text-based install, and to reduce the maintenance and bug count.

Performance Improvements

  • Diff storage improvements

    Starting in Review Board 1.7, newly uploaded diffs of files would be stored in the database only once, saving storage space if that particular file was used repeatedly in parent diffs or remained unchanged across several iterations of a change.

    In Review Board 2.0, when older diffs are viewed, they will be migrated to the new format if necessary.

  • Consolidated static media

    In order to speed up page loads, we’ve reduced the number of HTTP requests by consolidating stylesheets, JavaScript, and images into a smaller number of files.

  • Streamlined the “Edit Review” dialog.

    The Edit Review dialog was previously completely rendered on the server side, which could cause long delays when the review was large. This is now shown immediately in the browser and comments are fetched incrementally from the server.

  • Reduced the memory requirements on the review request and diff viewer pages.

  • Sped up publishing and discarding reviews.

  • Sped up creating, publishing, and discarding review request drafts.

  • Reduced the completion time for all API requests through the web UI.

  • Reduced the workload of some of our templates to slightly reduce memory usage and processing time.

  • Optimized the rendering of diffs.

    A series of optimizations were made to improve render time. Some operations are twice as fast as they were before.

    In particular, changes have been made to optimize highlighting of changed characters in “replace” lines.

  • Reduced the number of database queries when loading extensions.

  • Improved query time of lists of review requests when one or more are private.

Usability Improvements

  • The target users auto-complete now has a better order for the results, prioritizing usernames ahead of real names. (Bug #2107)

  • Review boxes containing draft replies are no longer auto-collapsed for the owner of the reply.

  • Review boxes containing open issues are no longer auto-collapsed for the owner of the review request.

  • The group links on the user page’s sidebar are now cleaner and easier to read.

  • All Markdown-capable fields include a link pointing to our Markdown syntax reference. (Bug #3201)

    Patch by Bhushan Ramnani.

  • The name shown for the account menu in the top-right is now the username, and not the first name.

    This makes it easier to remember your own username, which is more useful than helping remember your first name.

  • The list of columns on the Dashboard is now displayed in alphabetical order. (Bug #3260)

  • Increased the size of the comment dialog.

    The comment dialog is now a bit larger, providing more room for writing comments and code samples.

  • Added a red glow around opened but unfocused field editors on review requests. (Bug #3242)

    It was easy to miss that a field was open for edit but not saved, which could lead to lost data or warnings when leaving the page. There’s now a red glow around these fields to help highlight what’s still open.

  • Added confirmation when discarding a review request. (Bug #3117)

    It was easy to accidentally close a review request as discarded instead of submitted, which then required re-publishing before closing again.

    Now, closing as discarded will first prompt for confirmation, in order to ensure it wasn’t chosen by accident.

    Patch by Anselina Chia.

Internationalization

Review Board 2.0 includes partial translations into Italian (it_IT) and Traditional Chinese (zh_TW) locales. These can be activated by choosing preferred languages in your web browser preferences.

Contributions by Po-Chien Lin and Alessandro Menti.

Bug Fixes

General

  • Fixed the user info box to handle mouse motion better.

    The user info popup that shows up when hovering over a user’s name wasn’t very easy to use. It took too long to appear, and as soon as the mouse moved, it would disappear.

    It now appears quicker, stays open while the mouse is over it, and has a short delay before disappearing.

  • Fixed the z-index of the user account drop-down. (Bug #3088)

    The user account menu at the top right of the page would sometimes overlap incorrectly with other elements, especially within the admin UI.

    Patch by Natasha Dalal.

  • Fixed some other z-index issues throughout the UI.

  • Pressing Enter in auto-complete fields now properly completes the selected entry. (Bug #2779)

    This applies to the reviewer fields, search, and any other field that can be auto-completed.

  • Pressing Enter on an auto-completed item in the search field now navigates to that item. (Bug #3032)

    Patch by Mirai Akagawa.

  • Right-click and pasting content into the comment dialogs now enables the Save button. (Bug #2424)

  • The user information popup (shown when hovering over a username on the dashboard, review requests, or reviews) now wraps overly long e-mail addresses. (Bug #3215)

    Patch by Stephanie Su.

  • Fixed various browser compatibility issues with Firefox.

    Patch by Matthew N.

  • Diffs containing leading slashes are normalized to remove leading slashes, fixing lookups.

Installation

  • Fixed generating lighttpd configuration files using rb-site install (Bug #3263)

  • rb-site install gracefully handles issues when failing to create a database, allowing the user to fix the issue and try again without recreating the whole site. (Bug #2126)

  • Fixed Unicode errors with LDAP authentication when the user dn contains non-ASCII characters.

    Patch by Georgy Dyuldin.

  • Fixed breakages in the administration UI when viewing review requests with unicode characters in the summary. (Bug #3325)

Diff Viewer

  • When calculating function headers for PHP files, those functions with public, private, and protected keywords are now included. (Bug #2951)

  • Fixed possible deadlock issues when generating side-by-side diffs. (Bug #2247)

  • Fixed showing interdiffs for files that are reverted. (Bug #1486)

  • The expand icon is no longer shown if the section cannot be expanded.

  • Fixed a unicode issue when parsing files for interdiffs. (Bug #3291)

  • Key-based navigation now skips chunks of code hidden when hiding whitespace-only chunks. (Bug #3280)

  • Set the cwd of patch to be the tempdir. (Bug #2065)

    In some rare cases with older versions of patch, the diff would fail to display because the target files could not be found. Setting the working directory fixes this problem in this cases.

Diff Parsing

  • Fixed a Git diff parsing issue where we would sometimes try to read past the end of a file’s diff.

  • Fixed parsing of Git diffs with binary changes.

    Git diffs with a binary file at the end of the diff would show that file as empty instead of binary. These are now parsed correctly.

Review Requests

  • Disallow drag-and-drop uploads of non-files.

    The drag-and-drop support for uploading file attachments was too broad, and would accept drops of any type of data (for example, text from a word processor). This will now only accept file drops.

    Patch by Dave Druska.

  • The bugs field on a review request no longer allows duplicates. (Bug #3063)

  • Fixed regressions in storing and rendering changes to the Depends On field. (Bug #3073, Bug #3139)

  • Thumbnails for file attachments can no longer overflow the container.

    Patch by Tami Forrester.

  • Don’t show Show changes when there’s only one diff revision. (Bug #2901)

    It was previously possible to create a review request where the first revision of the diff was added after the initial publish. In this case, the change description box would include a link to “Show changes” between revisions 0 and 1, leading to a 404.

    Patch by Behzad Raeisfard.

Dashboard

  • Review request summaries can now wrap if they’re getting too long. (Bug #2125)

  • The pagination links can no longer overwrite the dashboard view states, such as the current page, column sorts, or Show/Hide filters. This also applies to the All Review Requests page, and other datagrid pages. (Bug #1155)

  • Fixed cases where crafting a URL for sorting non-sortable fields could cause an HTTP 500 error. (Bug #2565)

  • Review requests for inactive users are now shown on the All Review Requests page and the user page. (Bug #1436)

  • Loading the /r/ page before anything else would cause a profile lookup error. (Bug #3083)

    With a new user, if the first page they visited was the “All Review Requests” page (at /r/), the user profile would fail to be found and cause a 500 error. This has been fixed.

  • The Hide closed link (previously Hide submitted) on the All Review Requests page no longer impacts the dashboard. (Bug #3319)

  • Sorting on non-existing columns in the Dashboard no longer breaks.

Reviews

  • Trimming of extra whitespace around review comments. (Bug #2933)

    When writing comments, any blank lines at the beginning or end of the comment would be included in the page and e-mails. These are now stripped out.

    Patch by Edward Lee.

My Account Page

  • The Groups list no longer shows any Local Sites you’re a member of that don’t have any review groups set up.

  • Fixed some stylistic issues with checkboxes, labels, paragraphs, and e-mail fields.

Subversion

  • Filenames that contain a space are no longer cut off. This only applies to newly uploaded files. (Bug #1533)

ClearCase

  • Fix “Need more than 1 value to unpack” errors when uploading ClearCase diffs generated by hand. (Bug #3305)

    Patch by David Bodor.

CVS

  • Diffs generated on Windows that use nul: for the “old filename” when generating a diff for a new file are now handled correctly. (Bug #2294)

  • Fixed adding CVS repositories using versions older than 1.12 (Bug #3343)

LDAP

  • Usernames, domains and passwords are now encoded to UTF-8 before sending them over LDAP. (Bug #2978)

  • Usernames are now normalized, preventing issues when users log in with otherwise valid variations of a username. This converts to lowercase and strips special characters. (Bug #1478, Bug #1674, Bug #2924)

Active Directory

  • Escape User and Group names when using Active Directory filters. (Bug #2928)

    If User or Group names include characters which are designated as special characters by LDAP, it would cause an authentication failure. These names are now escaped before trying to run filters against Active Directory.

System Administration

  • Review counts are now reset for users when deleting a repository. (Bug #3192)

  • When creating a new site installation, the passwords the users confirm are now properly matched. (Bug #3006)

    Patch by Tami Forrester.

  • The filter menu for the database browser is now shown in full, even when there are no or few entries in the list. (Bug #3222)

    Patch by Joonas Lindholm.

Extensions

  • If two extensions depend on the same third-party app, Review Board won’t break if one of the extensions is disabled.

  • The extension list API no longer breaks if an extension can’t be loaded.

  • Fixed leaking of variables between hook-provided templates.

Other Bug Fixes

  • Logs containing timing operations weren’t portraying microseconds correctly. This could lead to operations appearing to take longer than they really did.

  • The rb-site manage command once again allows running management commands from extensions.

  • Added some bullet-proofing when failing to load settings from the database.

  • Fixed some issues using the site (particularly the dashboard) when using a multi-threaded web server or loader such as Apache’s mod_worker.

  • Fixed permission lookups when creating repositories through the web API. (Bug #3307)

  • Unicode values in GET query strings in the web API no longer cause HTTP 500 errors.

Changes since 2.0 RC 3

Bug Fixes

  • The Change Password form is no longer shown if the auth backend doesn’t support it. (Bug #3255)

    Patch by Volodymyr Lyubinets.

  • Fixed failures running the security checklist on very locked-down web servers. (Bug #3341)

  • Fixed URL lookups when resetting passwords. (Bug #3345)

  • Fixed decoding author and commit message strings from Subversion commits. (Bug #3346)

  • Fixed a crash in the New Review Request page when working with commits that don’t contain author information. (Bug #3349)

  • Fixed fetching original and patched files in the web API.

  • Fixed uploading file attachments without a browser-supplied mimetype.

  • Fixed JavaScript errors on the Manual Updates pages.

  • Fixed the styling of titles in the administration UI.

Contributors

  • Aamir Mansoor

  • Alessandro Menti

  • Allisa Schmidt

  • Anselina Chia

  • Behzad Raeisifard

  • Bhushan Ramnani

  • Christian Hammond

  • Crystal Lok Koo

  • Dave Druska

  • David Bodor

  • David Trowbridge

  • Edward Lee

  • Edwin Zhang

  • Emmanuel Gil Peyrot

  • Georgy Dyuldin

  • German Galkin

  • Hiroki Gohara

  • Joonas Lindholm

  • Katherine Schramm

  • Mark Côté

  • Mark Lee

  • Mary Elaine Malit

  • Matthew N

  • Mike Conley

  • Mirai Akagawa

  • Natasha Dalal

  • Nicolas Dély

  • Niklas Hambuechen

  • Olessia Karpova

  • Patrick Uiterwijk

  • Po-Chien Lin

  • Raja Venkataraman

  • Stephanie Su

  • Stephen Gallagher

  • Steven MacLeod

  • Tami Forrester

  • Tomasz Moń

  • Tomi Äijö

  • Vlad Safronov

  • Volodymyr Lyubinets

  • Yazan Medanat