400879 - Status whiteboard field truncated on show_bug.cgi when not editable

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Bugzilla :: Creating/Changing Bugs, defect)

Description

[Matt McHenry]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.7) Gecko/20070914 Firefox/2.0.0.7
Build Identifier: 

In bug 91037, the status whiteboard is currently set to "[Read Comment 312] *#*#* POST NO SUPPORT QUESTIONS HERE *#*#* [Summary: Comment 239]".  However, on show_bug.cgi, it shows up as "[Read Comment 312] *#*#* POST NO SUPPORT Q...".

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. View a bug with a long whiteboard.
Actual Results:  
Whiteboard is truncated.

Expected Results:  
Whiteboard contents should be shown in full.

The only way I've found to actually see the whiteboard in full is to add whiteboard as a column in your search results, then run a search whose results include the bug in question.

A similar issue exists with the URL, although it's easier to work around by hovering over the link and looking at the status bar in my browser.  I don't know if it makes as much sense to display the full URL all the time, so I'll restrict this bug to just the whiteboard.

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

2 years later, this bug is still there and renders whiteboard pretty much useless for anything longer than 37 characters, or an equivalent of ca. 6(!) words. That's insufficient even for very basic use cases (I just tried "[use new Steps to reproduce in comment #9; read comment #6]" in bug 376486).

Average user will not discover the workaround of hovering over whiteboard to see more of the whiteboard text as a title bubble, or using context menu properties.

Maybe someone can fix that single line of code and change the truncate limit from 37 characters to something like 70 (one full line) or 130 (two full lines).

Comment 2

[Matt McHenry]

Attachment: Patch to edit.html.tmpl (against 3.2.2) to make whiteboard field 130 chars wide

I'm not going to request review on this because I haven't actually tested it to see what it looks like.  But perhaps this will help to get the ball rolling.

Comment 4

[Frédéric Buclin]

The status whiteboard should be displayed as read only by default, as we do with several other fields now. This way, the text could easily wrap and be entirely readable. An (edit) link would let you edit this field as usual.

Comment 5

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Frédéric Buclin from comment #4)
> The status whiteboard should be displayed as read only by default, as we do
> with several other fields now. This way, the text could easily wrap and be
> entirely readable. An (edit) link would let you edit this field as usual.

+1. That sounds like one good way of solving this problem. Can we hope for this to be implemented?

7 years later, still a nuisance, and wasting everyone's precious time e.g. when users can't read those [Read comment X before commenting] warnings in whiteboard because it's all truncated away.

It's actually just as bad when editable for users with more rights, we don't even get the tooltip so all you can do is click into the field and start cursoring around to see all whiteboard entries.

Comment 6

[Kohei Yoshino [:kohei]]

The legacy show_bug UI retires soon, and it’s no longer an issue on the current “modal” UI.