221342 - cgi pages should generate some result code for automated tasks or other fronteds

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 224577

(Bugzilla :: Bugzilla-General, enhancement)

Description

[ET]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030728 Mozilla Firebird/0.6.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030728 Mozilla Firebird/0.6.1

i would like to request a new feature.
i'm currently developing some new java classes for ant.
it means that the ant targets could have access to bugzilla to (for example):
 - create/delete/modify products/milestones/versions/components
 - export/import bugs

i implement it just as the user would use the browser. it means posting http
data to the webserver.

most of the functionality is ready, but my major problem is error handling.
currently i have no idea how to check for errors. i defenetely not want to parse
the html pages because they won't work for every bugzilla installation. i would
like to have a more general solution.
to be able to do that i have to ask for your help because it needs some changes
on the bugzilla side.

i would propose the following (if possible):
 - (solution #1): with every http response coming back from the bugzilla server, 
 bugzilla would assure to have some kind of resultcode in the http header. with
 this solution we would be backward compatible and i (and every automated task
 or frontend) would have the chance to check for errors.
 - (solution #2): this would mean a bigger impact on bugzilla but the frontend
 of the code could be more general. what i'm thinking of is that bugzilla could
 have a general xml frontend. it means that with one more parameter passed to
 the bugzilla server we would not retrieve html page but xml documents. (just
 like in the case of the xml.cgi)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Reassigning bugs that I'm not actively working on to the default component owner
in order to try to make some sanity out of my personal buglist.  This doesn't
mean the bug isn't being dealt with, just that I'm not the one doing it.  If you
are dealing with this bug, please assign it to yourself.

Comment 2

[A. Karl Kornel]

Suggest INVALID, as this is too many issues for a single bug.  Maybe a tracking
bug could be created to track the creation of XML-format pages for all CGIs and
templates, and then numerous bugs would created as blockers of that.  Also see
bug 112646, bug 278832, bug 285614, and others.

As a per-installation workaround: Each error and output page is based on
templates (with the exception of a few admin pages).  The templates could be
modified to spit out specially-formatted HTML comments that you could parse. 
It's not perfect, but it would be a start!

Comment 3

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

A better solution is bug 224577, which would create an actual API to deal with
Bugzilla so that you would't have to hack it.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 224577 ***