Re: Users want to enter a CR once for several categories

Jo A Wahle <[email protected]> wrote:
    Jo> I've thought about some way to relate PRs to each other. The
    Jo> gnatsweb code looks for a special "related-prs" field, which I
    Jo> thought might be a starting point. It might work for the very
    Jo> last PR, to connect it to all the previous ones, but somehow the
    Jo> previously-entered PRs need to be related to the ones added
    Jo> later, and then there's the issue of keeping all of the lists in
    Jo> sync. Plus, that still doesn't help with the initial creation of
    Jo> the PRs, because the user still has to Create each one. I might
    Jo> be able to add a hack to gnatsweb that could take some form
    Jo> information and submit multiple PRs, but that doesn't hook them
    Jo> all together, because I have to get the PRs back for all the
    Jo> other PRs in

What about two new fields: Parent and Children.  Here, you can add PR's
in the syntax PR#NNNN, which gnatsweb should pick up and URL'izes.  Then
add an [Add Child] submission button that clones a portion of the
Description or Synopsis and automatically fills in the Parent field.
Once that functionality is set up for the singular instance, you could
construct a special [Add Children] submission button to specify multiple
categories in one fell swoop.  I'm not sure how beneficial that might
be, though.  You still might like to specify different responsibility
for different children.

The parent PR could remain in an open state until all of the children
are closed.  Having a Related-PRs field wouldn't be a bad idea for those
instances where a Parent-Child relationship isn't necessary.  I don't
think I would worry about trying to synchronize it with any other PR's
Related-PRs field.

An interesting AJAX hack would be to retrieve Category, Synopsis, and
State info when you mouse-over a PR's URL.

Other nice features to have would be for "clone" and "merge"
functionality...