Issues Customizing TestLink

[ivo.eersels]

(If this post belongs to another topic I apologize for putting it here as I didn't find a better place to put it. Also I am aware that the post is quite extensive, but I feel it is necessary to explain the problem I am facing in full to avoid the obvious question of : WHY?)

The QA department at my company has asked me to customize a number of things in the Testlink tool version 1.7.4 like: a new extended test result matrix page containing also a column with the keywords assigned to the test cases and with at the bottom a tabel of all non-Closed bugtracker (JIRA) bugs, showing the bug priority as well.

In the process I ended up writing custom methods for fetching the bug data from the database because I noticed that for instance when fetching the bug URL from JIRA, the fetched data was already concatenated into a URL in the results class and not in the resultsTC.php report page. Because of this I was unable to do other stuff with the elements that make up the URL and had to stringparse the bugURL to get the components out again. This proved too cumbersome and therefore I decided to get the all the bug data from the database directly and made sure that I had all the seperate bug data available till I reached the 'presentation' layer. Only in the report resultsTC.php I concatenate the bug data to a URL string and had all the other bug data at my disposal for creating a bug overview at the bottom of the page.

During this work I touched numerous standard TestLink files like resultsTC.php, results.class.php, resultsTC.tpl, int_bugtracking.php, int_jira.php, print.inc.php.

Now the QA Manager is talking about upgrading to 1.8.3 I was faced with doing all this work all over again. To avoid having to do this work with each upgrade I tried to do it more cleanly and made a new report like resultsETC.php, tried extending the results class and all other stuff I touched, but it got way too complicated to keep it all working properly. I was forced to reintegrate all the customizations again in the standard files of TestLink. So the only thing I kept was a separate report resultETC.php and template file.

So now I have two questions:
1) Am I stupid and did I miss entirely how to use the TestLink API and messed up standard TL files while it is obvious how to do it properly (with existing functions) so that the custom code works with each new version?

2) Is there the slightest chance that some of my customizations could be integrated into the standard TL project so they will be there in new versions? For instance the new report I made, the methods for getting the bug data, etc... I have all sources in a SVN repository and can provide them for review.

[havlatm]

TestLink developers like quality (although it's not too visible . That is why they often refactore core files and make private patches unusable for the next major release.
Contribution of your modification is the best way how to assure that your features serve you later. Check the page "HowTo contribute" http://www.teamst.org/index.php?option= ... &Itemid=38 of this server to start.
Now, 1.9 version is still open for accepted contributions.