Review Board 8.0 Release Notes¶

Office Document Review¶

Review Board can now be used to review documents, presentations, and more, whether those documents are files you’ve uploaded or they’re part of your diff.

The following documents are supported:

• Microsoft Office

• Google Docs

• LibreOffice/OpenOffice

• All PDF documents

Comments can be made by selecting text or by drawing a box over a region of the document and leaving a comment.

Reviewers can see a diff between each update of a document, showing a side-by-side view that highlights all of the text changes.

Learn more about using Document Review.

User Roles and Badges¶

User Roles are a flexible way to identify a user’s responsibilities and position in an organization, and help craft policy and automation rules.

Administrators can create roles and assign them to any number of licensed users. These can be used when configuring integrations or writing custom approval hooks. They’ll optionally appear as badges alongside the user throughout the UI.

Learn more about User Roles.

Writing Assistance – Spell Checking, Dictation, AI¶

You can now use your browser’s built-in writing assistance features, including spell checking, voice dictation, AI rewriting, and any other capabilities you would normally have available to help write text.

This is available when writing a comment, a review request description, or any other text field in a review or review request.

This feature is dependent on your browser, and is experimental. To enable it:

1. Go to My Account -> Settings.

2. Set Enable writing assistance for Markdown text fields.

Learn more about Writing Assistance.

Quick Access Actions for Reviews¶

You can now pin your most frequently-used review-related actions to your Review Banner.

The following Quick Access actions can be pinned:

• Create Review

• Edit Review

• Add General Comment

• Ship It!

These will be readily available on your review banner at the top of the window.

Learn more about Quick Access actions.

Ship It! Confirmation¶

Users can now control whether to prompt for confirmation when clicking Ship It!.

To change this setting:

1. Go to My Account -> Settings.

2. Change Prompt to confirm when publishing Ship It! reviews.

Learn more about your account settings.

Enhanced Interdiff Filtering¶

Review Board has supported interdiffs since Review Board 1.0, and has also supported filtering out of upstream changes made in-between two diff uploads.

Review Board 8 introduces the all-new version 3 of our algorithm for filtering out upstream changes, featuring:

• Better filtering out of upstream changes, letting you focus on just the changes you need to see.

• A new approach that’s no longer sensitive to how the uploaded diffs might be generated.

If you encounter any issues with interdiffs going forward, please contact us at support@beanbaginc.com.

Forgejo¶

Review Board now supports reviewing code on Forgejo.

Forgejo is an open source code hosting platform similar to GitHub and GitLab, available for free in your own network.

You can use Review Board to review your code on Forgejo, right alongside your code reviews for GitHub or any other supported service.

Learn more about hosting with Forgejo.

RB Gateway 2.0¶

Review Board can work with self-hosted Git repositories using the all-new RB Gateway 2.0.

This is a microservice that provides a Review Board-compatible API for your on-prem Git infrastructure, letting you post and manage review requests, browse for commits, and auto-close review requests on push.

Learn more about RB Gateway.

GitLab CI¶

You can now connect Review Board to your GitLab CI, triggering a build whenever a review request is posted.

GitLab CI builds can be run automatically, or can be set to run only when clicking a Run button.

Based on work by André Klitzing.

Learn more about integrating with GitLab CI.

Control over Ship It!¶

Administrators can now prevent users from assigning a Ship It! to their own review requests.

This is off by default so that there are no surprises, but administrators are encouraged to turn this on.

Learn more about Review Workflow settings.

SSL/TLS Certificate Storage¶

In-house source code repositories and authentication backends can now store and use self-signed SSL certificates in your site directory’s data/ directory. This can be used instead of installing these certificates system-wide.

Currently, installation of new certificates or bundles requires placing them in a specific location. Future versions will add a configuration page for managing your certificates.

Learn more about certificate management.

CIDR Subnets for Health Checks¶

The /health/ URL can be used to monitor the health of your Review Board server. This is restricted to the monitoring IP addresses you have specified.

Now you can include CIDR blocks as well as individual IP addresses. This is particularly useful for Kubernetes and other scaled-out deployments.

Learn more about configuring health check access.

Installation¶

• Fixed setting the configured cache server when creating a brand-new Review Board install.

Automated Reviews¶

• Fixed the owner of a review request not being able to manually run an automated review.

• The manual Run button is no longer present if the user doesn’t have permission to run an automated review.

Diff Viewer¶

• Fixed a bug showing reverted binary files in interdiffs.

• Fixed a crash when trying to download newly-added empty files.

• Fixed an incorrect display when showing new files with the same name as one that was deleted in a parent diff.

Search¶

• Fixed navigating to the last page of search results.

Administration UI¶

• Fixed being able to archive repositories that were no longer accessible.

• Sending a test e-mail on the E-mail Settings page now respects all the server’s e-mail settings.

Modern Python packaging¶

Extensions can now use modern pyproject.toml files for their packaging.

To support this, add the following to your file:

[build-system]
requires = [
    'reviewboard~=<version>',
    'reviewboard[extension-packaging]',
]
build-backend = 'reviewboard.extensions.packaging.backend'

rbext create will create this automatically for you if making a new extension.

If you have an existing setup.py, it will continue to work as-is.

Learn more about packaging extensions.

Modern default extensions with rbext¶

The rbext command is used to create and test your extensions.

rbext create has been updated to create a better boilerplate extension for you to customize.

Improved action framework for UI customization¶

Review Board provides an Actions framework for customizing parts of the UI, allowing extensions to include new buttons and menus for navigation and interacting with review requests.

We’ve made significant improvements, including:

• A new model for creating and rendering actions on the page, letting one action be used in multiple places (including as both buttons and menu items).

• Creation of Quick Access actions that appear on the banner that’s shown when reviewing changes.

• Actions that customize the administration UI sidebar.

Learn more about creating actions.

Simple custom columns for the Dashboard¶

It’s now easier than ever to create custom columns for the Dashboard.

Creating a column used to require carefully overriding the column’s constructor and passing a series of arguments to the parent. Now, they can be set right on the class as attributes.

Learn more about creating Dashboard columns.

Custom choices for condition rules¶

Extensions can provide choices to add to any condition rules, such as those used to configure integrations. These can be used to trigger automation rules such as Continuous Integration builds or Slack notifications.

Learn more about creating condition choices.

Custom page banners¶

Extensions can now provide custom banners at the top of the page in a standard style. These can be used for important notices you want to communicate to all the users on your server.

Learn more about creating page banners.

New signals for reviews¶

The new reviewboard.reviews.signals.comment_issue_status_updated signal will be emitted whenever someone resolves, drops, or re-opens an issue on a comment.