400063 - Allow saved searches to be shared with users with no account

Status: NEW

(Bugzilla :: Query/Bug List, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Frédéric Buclin]

Currently, when you want to share a saved search, you can only do it with an existing Bugzilla group. Bug 365108 asks to extend this functionality to several groups at once, which is a good start. But I want in some cases to be able to share a query with everybody, i.e. with users being in no group as well as with users having no Bugzilla account. This is especially useful e.g. when you want to easily share queries about bugs needing triage, blockers, TODO lists, etc... A NULL value in the DB would do it, meaning "everybody".

Comment 1

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

  How would users with no Bugzilla account see that a search was available?

Comment 2

[Frédéric Buclin]

(In reply to comment #1)
>   How would users with no Bugzilla account see that a search was available?

Thanks to e.g. blogs or specific websites (e.g. wiki). I see QA folks posting URLs to their saved searches so that users wanting to help during test days can click on them and see the list of bugs to confirm/verify. But not all these users have an account on b.m.o, sometimes only on Litmus, or even no account at all anywhere. There is no reason to exclude these users from using our saved searches if you point them to these links.

Comment 3

[Marc Schumann [:Wurblzap]]

Sharing a bug with everybody is easy: create a group named "everybody", give it a regexp of ".*", and share the query with this group.

But yes, the idea of being able to access a shared query without being logged in is intriguing.

Comment 4

[Marc Schumann [:Wurblzap]]

... in particular, as a way to have tinyurls of our own :)

Comment 5

[Frédéric Buclin]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Sharing a bug with everybody is easy: create a group named "everybody", give it
> a regexp of ".*", and share the query with this group.

Right, this is already doable if admins want this. So let's focus on the "no account" thing.

Comment 6

[Frédéric Buclin]

I just started looking at how we could implement this and I have the following questions:

* UI:

Should we add a new item to the select box named "public" and let all users having an account access this query? This would violate the usevisibilitygroup parameter. But on the other hand, it would be confusing that users with no account can access the query, but users with an account cannot (depending on the groups they belong to). Or do we prefer to add a checkbox "public" so that you can still decide with which group you want to share you query? Here too, the behavior would look strange.

* back-end:

Should we have a new column in the namedquery_group_map table named "public", which would match how the checkbox above works, or should we let the existing group_id column empty (NULL) meaning that the query is public (this would match the "public" item added to the select box)?

* security:

Should this feature be automatically disabled if usevisibilitygroup is enabled?
Currently, you can only share with groups you belong to. Should a public query be available in the footer in all cases for all logged in users or remain limited as we do now, i.e. you can only run the query but not have it in the footer?


Not sure what the best approach is. Suggestions?

Comment 8

[Frédéric Buclin]

We are going to branch for Bugzilla 4.4 next week and this bug is either too invasive to be accepted for 4.4 at this point or shows no recent activity. The target milestone is reset and will be set again *only* when a patch is attached and approved.

I ask the assignee to reassign the bug to the default assignee if you don't plan to work on this bug in the near future, to make it clearer which bugs should be fixed by someone else.

Comment 9

[Peter Jackson]

(In reply to Max Kanat-Alexander from comment #1)
>   How would users with no Bugzilla account see that a search was available?

One way would be to implement bug 1251415 (which I just raised!).

Comment 10

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Removing good-first-bug keyword because team does not have bandwidth to mentor at the moment.

Comment 11

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Removing outreachy because team does not have bandwidth to mentor this cycle.