Question

Hi folks

We have a non development orientated team within our business that essentially needs a case management system. We are considering using an existing case management system and modifying it. Since we use fogbugz within the development environment, it would be our first choice.

In order for this to work we would need to make some changes to the case entry form.

• Change the bug categories or provide an alternative field of categories and hide the normal bug, feature etc. (although keeping inbox and surrounding functionality would be useful)

• Add additional fields such as organisation (custom fields plugin) and provide validation (js/bugmonkey ?)

• Extend the case entry form or provide another form for imputing geographical location information. The fields displayed or enabled on this form would vary depending on the case custom case categories we would need to define.

I would guess this constitutes fairly extensive customisation and what we would end up with is essentially a custom branch of fogbugz that could only be supported internally, this of course would be true of any system that we customised or wrote ourselfs so just to clarify that is not an issue.

What is the best way to achieve this -Can it be done with the plugin architecture -Would be be better hosting some kind of ascx .net control in the fogbugz page (if this is even possible) -Would be be better modifying the editBug wasabi code?

I assume plugins have been written that add complex functionality to fogbugz so some pointers as to how that can be achieved would be very valuable.

Cheers Felix

Answer 1

I'll try to answer or provide ideas for your requirements in order:

The Custom Workflow plugin will let you define your own categories on a project-by-project basis. This should let you have your own set of custom categories as long as this new type of case is in it's own project or set of projects.

Additional custom fields are not currently supported on a per-project basis (that I know of), but this is likely to be added soon since it is a highly requested feature. For now, you could use some BugMonkey modifications to disable or hide those "special" custom fields where they are not needed.

The category-dependent fields would be just an extension of the other custom fields (for now) that would need to be shown/hidden based on the selected category using a BugMonkey script.

I don't know if the plugin architecture is sufficiently powerful to do all of that at this point, but I imagine it soon will be since people have been clamoring for this sort of customizeability for some time now. In the mean time, if you can get by with the BugMonkey hackery, you should be OK, since it is pretty powerful (the full might of the jQuery library is at it's disposal).

EDIT: Any validation that is needed, while not robust in terms of completely preventing invalid values, can also be done with additional BugMonkey scripts. This will let you check the values inputted, as well as format if needed. In general, this solution will work well and can be used such that, on form.submit, you can run your checks and cancel the form submit with an error box if you need to.