On 12/16/2015 6:42 PM, Ron W wrote:
.... Actually, I think it's "spread sheets". In the company I work for, it's customers and it's suppliers, when we meet with "project managers" about the status of issues, the PMs are presenting from their spread sheets and updating them as we disuss the issues.
As a consultant, I deal frequently with external customers who hired my company because they don't do (or often understand) software themselves. Getting them to use tickets directly is worse than herding cats.
We usually resort to spread sheets containing summary reports, often backed by printing the hot tickets so they can be discussed by email or across a table.
To make that process less painful, I built a tool that uses the optional JSON support to run ticket reports and present them in PDF created via Markdown and Pandoc. It is at Chiselapp, but I haven't touched it in a while.
https://chiselapp.com/user/rberteig/repository/Ticketer/home
Fossil already has a way to "export" in a "flat file" format: "fossil ticket show". It's basically TAB separated values. The fields shown are driven by selecting a report that has been defined via the Fossil GUI.
There is also a built-in report number 0 which dumps all fields of all tickets.
Would be nice if there was a "fossil ticket export" command that would produce a "proper" CSV file. While "proper" is still something of a debate, most spread sheet apps (Excel, LibreCalc, GnomeCalc, etc) seem to adequately digest CSV files where fields that contain comas or newlines are enclosed in double quotes, with any contained double quote escaped (I think by doubling - ie. like "has ""quote"" inside").
A problem with CSV is that there really isn't a clear definition of it at its edge cases other than testing what Excel will import correctly.
But it is true that the existing options supported by "fossil ticket show" do not even attempt to create valid CSV other than for simple reports where the columns are known to contain only "safe" characters.
Build fossil with JSON support, then you get access to a bunch of features with data transported in JSON with suitable quoting. I'm not sure why JSON is not enabled in the official distributions, it works for me.
-- Ross Berteig [email protected] Cheshire Engineering Corp. http://www.CheshireEng.com/ _______________________________________________ fossil-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users
