What don't you like about the Change Explorer view for code reviews?

Cheers,
Geoff

On 8/13/2010 10:53 AM, Danil wrote:

Danilwrote:
It's not clear to me that you can readily find all changesets by a
particular user.

Aha - Search> Jazz Source Control> Change
sets... lets you do exactly that. That gives you a
grid of change sets in the Search results pane. Unfortunately, it
seems the only place you can go from there is the Change Explorer.

The change explorer is awful for code reviews - i'd be much better off
if I could jump directly to viewChangeSet. I could patch it together
by hand, if I could get at the IDs of the changeset and the
component, but that doesn't seem to be possible either.

Is there a bridge? or do I need to roll my own solution here?

One global comment: I'm not suggesting that the Change Explorer view is
an ideal code review tool ... just that it sounds like you might not be
using it in the way that is most suitable for code reviews.

A couple of questions:
- What is the "viewChangeSet view"?
- Have you clicked on "show files" in the Change Explorer view? That
shows you the file-based view that one wants for code reviews. It
sounds like you are using the "show change sets" option.

WRT "open each folder in turn", there is an "expand all folders" option
that lets you open all folders in one gesture.

WRT "have to go to the context menu for each file individually", the
gesture to open a display of all the changes in a particular file is
"double click" on the line for that file in the Change Explorer view
(opens that file in the compare editor). So you don't need to go to the
context menu.

WRT "open the compare editor for multiple files at the same time", were
you looking for a single compare buffer, with all the changes from all
the files concatenated (assumedly with an indication of which file the
change was from), or just a gesture that opens up multiple different
compare buffers, one for each modified file?

Cheers,
Geoff

On 8/13/2010 5:07 PM, Danil wrote:

gmclemmwrote:
What don't you like about the Change Explorer view for code reviews?

It's badly designed for this task?

The short answer is to compare what you see in the viewChangeSet view,
and compare the number of gestures that are required to view the same
data.


The tree view as a mechanism for showing the hierarchy of of the
change set seems very broken, it adds extra rows that add no value,
and requires the user to expand each folder in turn to get at the
contents.

Oh and some of the folders are empty, which makes that element in the
tree explorer completely non functional, but you won't know until you
expand it.

Far as I can tell, I can't open the compare editor for multiple files
at the same time, but instead have to go to the context menu for each
file individually. I really ought to be able to open everything at
once, and maybe also the option to open everything in a folder.

In short, the change set is being presented as a collection of
isolated and unrelated items, when I need to be able to view the
whole.

WRT "see above: "...": Many rich client readers (such as Thunderbird)
don't show earlier messages in a thread unless they've been explicitly
included in the body of the response (which is why those news readers by
default include a copy of the message being answered in the body of the
response). Of course, that means that web browser readers get annoyed,
because they then see multiple copies of the previous messages, while
rich client readers get annoyed because people don't include critical
context for their followup. I have no good answer for this, other than
suggesting that browser folks might include a copy of key context
information.

But back to what this thread is actually about:

It sounds like if you could multi-select all the files you want
compared, and then issue a single "compare" request, you'd have
something pretty close to the compare tabs produced by BeyondCompare.
I've submitted work item 126436, requesting this enhancement. Please
add a comment if you'd like to revise the proposed enhancement, or just
to indicate your interest/support.

Cheers,
Geoff

On 8/14/2010 12:53 PM, Danil wrote:

gmclemmwrote:
One global comment: I'm not suggesting that the Change Explorer view
is
an ideal code review tool ... just that it sounds like you might not
be
using it in the way that is most suitable for code reviews.

I believe that - I'm happy to be told both how I should use it
instead, and where I ought to have read that before trying it.

gmclemmwrote:

- What is the "viewChangeSet view"?


see above: "In the web interface, the
com.ibm.team.scm.viewChangeSet action...." It's the closets
analog I've seen to the "Describe Change List"
functionality of P4. Alas, it doesn't seem to be reachable from the
eclipse client?

gmclemmwrote:
WRT "open the compare editor for multiple files at the same
time", were you looking for a single compare buffer, with all
the changes from all the files concatenated (assumedly with an
indication of which file the change was from), or just a gesture that
opens up multiple different compare buffers, one for each modified
file?

The latter, I think. I had observed, using Beyond Compare 3 as my
external comparison tool, that I could send file A to the comparison
tool, and then file B, and the result would be one Beyond Compare
session with a tab for each of the two diffs.

My conclusion was that if the Change Explorer would iterate through
groups of files, rather than making me do so by hand, then the rest
of the behavior is good enough.