Question

Possible Duplicate:
Feature Request: Templated case notification email

Hi all,

Our development team has been using FogBugz for a long time (currently we use v6.1.44), and it's generally worked really well.

Recently, though, we had a minor snafu where an urgent bug didn't get addressed in a timely manner, because the developer that the case was assigned to overlooked the notification email that FogBugz sent to him, and he was therefore unaware that the case existed.

In order to prevent that sort of thing from happening again, we'd like to tweak the format of the notification emails so that the "really important" ones are easier to pick out at a glance, and thus there is less risk of them being overlooked on days when many other notification emails are arriving as well.

In particular, we would like to be able to make the following changes to the notification emails that FogBugz sends:

1) For notification emails associated with any case that has priority "1/URGENT", we'd like the word URGENT to appear at the beginning of the subject line, like this:

URGENT: FogBugz (Case 1234) Product has become sentient, is hunting users

2) For all cases, we'd like to including the name of the case's current assignee at the start of the subject line, like this:

For Jeremy: FogBugz (case 1235) Login page not functional or elegant

3) Currently, the first line of notification emails for new cases says "A case was assigned to you in FogBugz." We'd like to change that sentence to include the assignee's name instead of a pronoun, e.g. "A case was assigned to Jeremy in FogBugz.". (Since the notification emails can be sent to multiple people, it's not always immediately obvious who "you" refers to)

My question is, what is the best and quickest way for me to get these changes implemented? e.g. would we need only to upgrade to a newer version of FogBugz and change some settings? Or is there a particular plugin I should look in to employing? Would it be reasonable (or even possible) to jump in to the source code and hack these changes in by hand? Or do I need to file one or more feature requests and then sit on my hands until Fog Creek implements them in the next release?

Thanks in advance for any help or advice you can provide, Jeremy

Answer 1

Unfortunately, there's not a built-in way to tweak the notifications that get sent out.

If you wanted to fully customize your notifications, you could write a plugin to use the CMailApi class to send notifications exactly how you want.

If you're running a licensed version of FogBugz on your local machine, you could tweak the source code to see if you could get the data you are looking for into notifications. You can modify the FogBugz source code, found in src-website of your FogBugz installation, and then run build.bat from your installation directory. Look at Function GetEmailSubject() and pay attention to where it gets called. Unfortunately, we can't provide much more detailed support for customizing the source code base unless we're working on a mission-critical situation. However, you're free to poke around to see if you can't get it work the way you want.