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Lighthouse to Tender notification

• Edit

Jonatan

01 Aug, 2013 04:33 PM

So I understand there's no email notifications going out to watchers of a discussion when an attached LH ticket is opened or closed.

In our workflow we'd really need that.

Now we have to manually comment "I created a ticket" and "the ticket is now closed/bug is fixed/feature is done" instead of just having an automated email going out informing watchers about the state of the ticket.

Is there no plan on implementing this? Or do you have a suggestion for a different workflow?

Thanks,
Jonatan

1. 1 Posted by Jonatan on 01 Aug, 2013 04:35 PM

   

   http://help.tenderapp.com/discussions/suggestions/555-lighthouse-to-tender-notification

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2. 2 Posted by Julien on 01 Aug, 2013 06:00 PM

   

   Hi Jonathan,

   There is no notification but the discussion is put back in pending. Can you describe your workflow a little more? Usually the way we work is we close the ticket in Lighthouse, and then deal with discussions as they come back in pending to updates users.

   Thanks.

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3. 3 Posted by Jonatan Dahl on 02 Aug, 2013 02:22 PM

   

   Currently we're using Tender internally for all the non developers of the
   company, and the developers use LH for ticket management. The non
   developers usually reports issues they get from our customers (by phone or
   mail).

   Whenever a non developer in the team reports something on Tender they want
   to get notified on changes to the discussion they've created. If there's no
   email notifications sent out when an attached LH ticket status is changed,
   or when a discussion is moved back to pending, it means that a developer
   has to go back to Tender and manually make a comment about it. And every
   time there's need for manual work to just inform people that there's been a
   state change, there's a risk it won't happen, that it'll be forgotten by
   the developer, or ignored because it takes time.

   Basically, we're using so many different tools and the only way to inform
   people of what's going on is to have email notifications sent out on
   changes. No one will ever actively go look just to see if there's been a
   change somewhere.

   The workflow you're describing: dealing with external users, requires in my
   opinion a more active communication approach, just as as you're describing;
   actually going back to the discussion and continuing the conversation.

   In our case, we need more automation. Otherwise, the work done by
   developers is just gonna go unnoticed by the rest of the team.

   What would you suggest, put all the non developers on LH as well and stick
   to only that (everyone gets notified)?

   Since we're a small team and hard working on different things we won't be
   able to actively be on Tender daily to check the status of current
   discussions, whether something has popped into pending or not etc. That's
   why it'd be super useful for us to have some more types of email
   notifications sent out to watchers (i.e. when an LH ticket has changed)

   Thanks for your support

   Cheers,
   Jonatan,
   Front-end Developer
   www.enternships.com

   • Edit

4. 4 Posted by Julien on 02 Aug, 2013 04:23 PM

   

   Hey Jonatan,

   Thanks for the lengthy explanation. There is no direct notification of status changes because they are not always "relevant". Let me explain: if users in Tender do not have access to Lighthouse, and they see a ticket closed, they naturally assume that the issue is fixed. This is however, not always true: the ticket may have been deemed invalid, wont fix, or any other state that is considered "closed" in Lighthouse, but is not the answer the user expect. There may also be gaps between the time a ticket is closed (fixed in code) and deployed (the fix is available to users). And finally, you may not want to notify all users if you have very old tickets (I know we have conversations in our Tender that date back to 2011 or 2010, and when we close a ticket that affected those users, we don't really want to spam them about it, they have moved on).

   For all these reasons, we felt that notifying users required a human interaction/decision rather than an automatic process.

   That being said, I see you have a different and valid use case, so let me ponder it for a little bit to see if I can come up with a good solution for you.

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5. 5 Posted by Julien on 05 Aug, 2013 10:42 PM

   

   Hey Jonatan,

   For the reasons explained in my previous comment, I doubt we will change the current behavior. I think the easiest way to achieve what you want is to use a hook in Tender to get notified of new comments, and when a comment comes in that a ticket has changed state, add a new one, visible to everyone, with the same message. You could alternatively use a hook in Lighthouse to do the same: that's how we do it.

   What is your programming language of choice?

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6. 6 Posted by Jonatan Dahl on 06 Aug, 2013 11:19 AM

   

   Hey,

   Thanks for your suggestions. Your explanations make a lot of sense, I fully
   understand your design decisions.

   My programming language of choice is PHP or ruby

   Cheers

   • Edit

7. 7 Posted by Julien on 06 Aug, 2013 06:49 PM

   

   Hey Jonatan,

   Here is a simple sinatra app you could use as a basis for this hook:

   require 'json'
   require 'sinatra'
   
   TOKEN = "XXX"
   
   post '/hook' do
     disc = JSON.parse(request.body.read)
     if disc["internal"] && disc["body"] =~ /EXPRESSION/
       # Different body otherwise comment will be deleted as duplicate
       json = {:body => "NOTE: #{disc["body"]}"}.to_json
       url = "#{disc["discussion"]["href"]}/comments?auth=#{TOKEN}"
       `curl -H 'Accept: application/vnd.tender-v1+json' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '#{json}' #{url}`
     end
   end
   

   It's pretty low key, but it does its job.

   Cheers.

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8. 8 Posted by Jonatan Dahl on 07 Aug, 2013 01:43 PM

   

   Hi,

   Thanks for the code snippet. I'll look into it!

   Thank your for your great support. I really appreciate it

   Regards,
   Jonatan

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9. 9 Posted by Julien on 07 Aug, 2013 05:28 PM

   

   No worries. You don't have to use Sinatra, and could accomplish something similar in PHP. But as you can see it's really pretty easy: check the body, and post back if it's a match.

   If you need help with anything else, just let me know.

   Cheers!

   • Edit

10. Julien closed this discussion on 14 Aug, 2013 06:12 PM.