4.28. Integration with Bug Tracking Systems / Issue Trackers

This property activates the bug tracking system in Input field mode. If this property is set, then TortoiseSVN will prompt you to enter an issue number when you commit your changes. It's used to add a line at the end of the log message. It must contain %BUGID%, which is replaced with the issue number on commit. This ensures that your commit log contains a reference to the issue number which is always in a consistent format and can be parsed by your bug tracking tool to associate the issue number with a particular commit. As an example you might use Issue : %BUGID%, but this depends on your Tool.

This text is shown by TortoiseSVN on the commit dialog to label the edit box where you enter the issue number. If it's not set, Bug-ID / Issue-Nr: will be displayed. Keep in mind though that the window will not be resized to fit this label, so keep the size of the label below 20-25 characters.

If set to true only numbers are allowed in the issue-number text field. An exception is the comma, so you can comma separate several numbers. Valid values are true/false. If not defined, true is assumed.

This property defines if the bug-ID is appended (true) to the end of the log message or inserted (false) at the start of the log message. Valid values are true/false. If not defined, true is assumed, so that existing projects don't break.

This property activates the bug tracking system in Regex mode. It contains either a single regular expressions, or two regular expressions separated by a newline.

If two expressions are set, then the first expression is used as a pre-filter to find expressions which contain bug IDs. The second expression then extracts the bare bug IDs from the result of the first regex. This allows you to use a list of bug IDs and natural language expressions if you wish. e.g. you might fix several bugs and include a string something like this: “This change resolves issues #23, #24 and #25”.

If you want to catch bug IDs as used in the expression above inside a log message, you could use the following regex strings, which are the ones used by the TortoiseSVN project: [Ii]ssues?:?(\s*(,|and)?\s*#\d+)+ and (\d+).

The first expression picks out “issues #23, #24 and #25” from the surrounding log message. The second regex extracts plain decimal numbers from the output of the first regex, so it will return “23”, “24” and “25” to use as bug IDs.

Breaking the first regex down a little, it must start with the word “issue”, possibly capitalised. This is optionally followed by an “s” (more than one issue) and optionally a colon. This is followed by one or more groups each having zero or more leading whitespace, an optional comma or “and” and more optional space. Finally there is a mandatory “#” and a mandatory decimal number.

If only one expression is set, then the bare bug IDs must be matched in the groups of the regex string. Example: [Ii]ssue(?:s)? #?(\d+) This method is required by a few issue trackers, e.g. trac, but it is harder to construct the regex. We recommend that you only use this method if your issue tracker documentation tells you to.

If you are unfamiliar with regular expressions, take a look at the introduction at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression , and the online documentation and tutorial at http://www.regular-expressions.info/ .

It's not always easy to get the regex right so to help out there is a test dialog built into the bugtraq properties dialog. Click on the button to the right of the edit boxes to bring it up. Here you can enter some test text, and change each regex to see the results. If the regex is invalid the edit box background changes to red.