mcd Posted October 20, 2016 Report Share Posted October 20, 2016 Long time user of Plastic, love it. Recently have been looking to integrate an issue/project manager and have settled on Jira, but am struggling to fit it into my current workflow. Currently, I use the 1 workspace per project/app approach and also 1 branch per task. What has been enormously helpful and I think one of Plastics strengths is customization of branch names so that they can be helpful and informative to the UX. The way I personally do this is by naming the branches after the component/class that the task is working on, along with a numbered suffix, eg., main/foo_001, main/foo_002, etc. This allows for VERY quick searches of historical changes to components and related tasks (typing foo into search gives an immediate return of all foos), and allows for very useful contextual reference when browsing through the branch explorer (spacial understanding of where everything is). With the Jira integration however, the Plastic UI is completely undermined as branch names are absolutely useless as navigation aids as they are simply repetitive prefixes and a counter (eg, scm001). The only way to get any information from the Branch Explorer is to actually click on a branch so it brings up the Properties Tab. It becomes even more difficult in the Branches view, as you have to reference comments to understand what might be happening in that branch. So, as a potential solution... what do you guys think about maybe doing something similar to what's being done for non-Jira branches, and that is to have some Display options that reference Jira fields? Eg, currently we can "Display branch task info" in the branch explorer, so, what about having some Jira Disaply Options, like "Display Component" or "Display Label" etc. This would DRAMATICALLY improve the UX in Plastic with Jira integration as now the user would see main/scm001:foo_component or main/scm001:foo_label, etc. What do you guys think? Is this doable? Thank you! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mcd Posted October 22, 2016 Author Report Share Posted October 22, 2016 Thinking about this more over the weekend and realized there may be an even easier, albeit less ideal solution: Allow for additional branch naming after the prefix/Issue# that is separated by a space. Everything after the space will be ignored for jira integration purposes. So, the title "scm001", could be formatted "scm001 foo_component". With plastic ignoring the 'space' foo_component part of the branch name and only using the scm001 to sync. Thoughts? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manu Posted October 25, 2016 Report Share Posted October 25, 2016 Hi mcd! Sorry, I don't fully understand the issues you have. If you are not connected to Jira you can have something like "/main/345" + a branch comment that can be rendered at the branch explorer using the "Display branch task info" option. So for example for the "345" branch the final name would be: "/main/345: This is a new feature" If you are connected with Jira you have an extra prefix + the Jira title. The final name would be: /main/PRJ345: This is a new feature from JIRA" We can think in rendering different Jira fields instead of the issue title but I don't fully understand the current problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mcd Posted October 25, 2016 Author Report Share Posted October 25, 2016 Hi Manu! Sorry, will be more clear. Not connected to Jira, I use something like "/main/component_001", which allows me to quickly see which branches are working on which components from the branch explorer. In branch comments, I use that to explain what will be taking place inside the branch for later reference. This can be quite long, so rendering the comments with "Display branch task info" does not display well in the Branch Explorer in practice. Connected to Jira, I don't see what you're seeing. Using your example, I only see "/main/PRJ345" in the branch explorer. In order to see the Title, I need to click on the branch. Your docs reflect what I see with the Title only being visible in the Options sidebar: The issue with the above, is if you're trying to quickly browse around in the explorer (by panning), trying to get a visual reference on what was worked on where, or what was recently worked on, etc., you only have not particularly helpful PRJ345 type branch names (or JIRA_FG-1 type names as above). You have to stop panning, click on a branch, and look over in the sidebar to see what the Title is. The branch explorer loses a lot of value like this. It would be great to be able to see the title in the Branch Explorer itself as you described, so "JIRA_RI-1 Create Report Designer". It would be _awesome_ to have the option to see additional items, like component or status, etc. Thanks for the reply, and I hope that was more clear. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Misieq Posted October 26, 2016 Report Share Posted October 26, 2016 Hi Issue title display displayed together with branch name is available in Plastic since a while... Check if you have this option set The only limitation is that for very short branches (e.g. with single changset) sometimes title is "shortened" too much. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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