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The Trac Ticket System

The Trac ticket system provides a simple but effective way to track issues and software bugs within a project.

As the central project management element of Trac, tickets can be used for project tasks, feature requests, bug reports, software support issues among others.

As with the TracWiki, this subsystem has been designed to make user contribution and participation as simple as possible.

An issue is assigned to a person who must resolve it or reassign the ticket to someone else. All tickets can be edited, annotated, assigned, prioritized and discussed at any time.

However, a Trac installation may place restrictions on who can change what. For example, the default installation doesn't permit to non-authenticated users ("anonymous" users) to change anything, even to comment on an issue, for obvious spam prevention reasons. Check the local contributing policy, which you can usually find on the front page of WikiStart, or contact your local Trac administrator.

Ticket Fields

A ticket contains the following information:

Notes:

Changing and Commenting Tickets

With appropriate permissions, as already mentioned above, a ticket entered into Trac can at any time be modified by annotating.

Then, annotations like changes and comments to the ticket are logged as a part of the ticket itself. When viewing a ticket, the history of changes will appear below the main ticket area.

Comment editing (available since 0.12) is meant to be used to make small corrections to comments, like fixing formatting, forgotten WikiFormatting or spelling errors, not major edits. For longer edits, you should be adding a new comment instead. Editing a comment will not produce a new entry on timeline, while entering a new comment or other changes will do.

All edits (field changes, new comments, comment edits) update the "last changed" time of the ticket.

Notes:

Default Values for Drop-Down Fields

The option selected by default for the various drop-down fields can be set in trac.ini, in the [ticket] section:

If any of these options are omitted, the default value will either be the first in the list, or an empty value, depending on whether the field in question is required to be set. Some of these can be chosen through the WebAdmin plugin in the "Ticket System" section, others can be set in the [ticket] section in trac.ini.

Hiding Fields and Adding Custom Fields

Many of the default ticket fields can be hidden from the ticket web interface simply by removing all the possible values through trac-admin. This of course only applies to drop-down fields, such as type, priority, severity, component, version and milestone.

Trac also lets you add your own custom ticket fields. See TracTicketsCustomFields for more information.

Assign-to as Drop-Down List

If the list of possible ticket owners is finite, you can change the assign-to ticket field from a text input to a drop-down list. This is done by setting the restrict_owner option of the [ticket] section in trac.ini to true. In that case, Trac will populate the list with all users who have an authenticated session and possess the TICKET_MODIFY permissions.

An authenticated session will be created the first time a user authenticates with the project. You can manually add an authenticated session using the trac-admin session add command. The :1 suffix on the session id (i.e. username) is the key to creating an authenticated session:

trac-admin /path/to/projenv session add <sid>:1 [name] [email]

You may find the dropdown list is overpopulated with users that are no longer active in the project. Revoking authentication privileges will not remove the session data that is used to populate the dropdown list. The trac-admin command can be used to list and remove sessions:

Alternatively, you can just revoke TICKET_MODIFY from users that you don't want to be included in the list. However, that will not be possible if you've granted TICKET_MODIFY to all anonymous or authenticated users.

Notes:

Preset Values for New Tickets

To create a link to the new-ticket form filled with preset values, you need to call the /newticket? URL with variable=value separated by &. Possible variables are:

Example: [/newticket?summary=Compile%20Error&version=1.0&component=gui]


See also: TracGuide, TracWiki, TracTicketsCustomFields, TracNotification, TracReports, TracQuery