109545 - Avantgo (mobile) bugzilla channel

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Bugzilla :: Bugzilla-General, enhancement, P4)

Description

[Alec Flett]

I've been doing some research into turning web content into AvantGo content, and
I've turned up some interesting findings.
Basically you can point avantgo at any publically accessable http url, and it
will attempt to save that html and render it to your PDA (i.e. PalmOS, PocketPC,
etc) for offline viewing. It is even smart about cookies, form submission, etc. 

I'm a big avantgo user, and use it to read news, stock quotes, etc, while I'm
offline. I recently tried creating a "Custom channel" and pointed it at some
bugzilla links... amazingly, it seemed to work! However, given the current links
and forms available on bugzilla, its a bit hard to use.

So I have a plan: We make a new CGI that gives you a toplevel bugzilla channel
page. This page would have links to saved queries, and you could view/edit bugs
from there.

The biggest problem is getting bugzilla content scaled dow to a handheld.
Here are some ways we can tackle this:
- The bug lists can just use the standard column-picking mechanism to get a
"Scaled down" view of the bugs, but the overall page would have to be shrunk
down  , a minimal text header, no footer, no quip, etc

- the bugs themselves would have to either be:
  - displayed in a read-only fashion (since html widgets take up lots of real
estate)
  - rearranged to show only certain fields (maybe have an advanced view which
shows them all)
  - rearranged in a single column 

Anyway, this is just a start, but it also requires a few features from bugzilla,
such as saving queries on the server, (in the user's prefs, instead of just in
the client cookies like they are today) better handling of form submission, so
that collisions only occur when the exact field has changed, etc.
I'll file bugs on these issues.

One thing I haven't worked out is how much JS is supported on the PDA, if any.

Comment 1

[GavinS]

Related to bug#101865.

Comment 2

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

OK, well queries have been stored server side for donkey's years to my knowledge.

The idea that mid-air collisions only occur on field clashes has been brought up
and rejected in the past, and I agree with that.  The midair system doesn't just
exist to ensure changes don't overwrite each other, but also to notify users of
changes that have occurred, because they might no longer want to make their
change in light of that.  Perhaps bug #107306 might help you to a degree?

We shouldn't be requiring any Javascript in Bugzilla, if so that's a bug. 
Javascript is used to make the user experience easier only.

I'm not sure who would be working on this though, so I'm moving it to Future. 
Do many Netscape people use AvantGo or similar?  If so maybe you can get the
mozilla.org developers to do this.

Comment 3

[Jim Salter]

More and more folks are using bugzilla for tracking issues remotely, so more 
and more folks will be using avantgo and other services.

I've been working on this off-and-on for a month now, but I can't figure out 
how to templatize everything properly, yet...

Comment 4

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

feature request, not a bug.  I'm not personally working on this, so assigning to
nobody.  If someone else is working on this, feel free to take it.

Comment 5

[Teemu Mannermaa (:wicked)]

Sounds like AvantGo is dead these days and better solution is to create native mobile UI anyway, which is bug 101865.