Redmine extensions

I may have just hit an all-time-low in lines-of-code per hour, but it was fun nonetheless, so I thought I’d share this with you:

A customer had the crazy requirement for his Redmine Ticketing system that users can enter their email address to a ticket and be notified alongside the user that is associated with the user account. (This also means that many users are sharing one user to create Tickets in the System)

The solution was quite simple in the end, but getting there for a total stranger to Rails was a bit challenging.

First I created a custom field in Redmine that is required on all tickets and contains the email address the email should be sent to.

Next I went into app/models/issue.rb and changed the recipients method like this:

 # Returns the mail adresses of users that should be notified
def recipients
notified = project.notified_users
# Author and assignee are always notified unless they have been locked
notified << author if author && author.active?
notified << assigned_to if assigned_to && assigned_to.active?
notified.uniq!
# Remove users that can not view the issue
notified.reject! {|user| !visible?(user)}
notified.collect(&:mail) << custom_field_values
end

As you can see, all it took was to append the custom_field_values (assuming there is only one custom field!) to the list of emails that should be notified. Once that was done I just had to restart the ruby server and it worked.

If this looks hacky to you: It is. But the requirements didn’t really warrant any more work to be put into this.

Finally: Ruby is a fun language to work with, although it’s also rather hard to understand a complex project like Redmine if you are looking at it without any prior ruby knowledge.

What really got me in the beginning was that ruby has no return statement. Quite simply the last statement of a function is returned to it’s caller. If you don’t know that about the language, trying to understand what a function does get quite challenging :)