Saturday, May 10, 2008

Using Redmine with the Mylyn Eclipse Plugin

This video will show you how to use the Mylyn plugin to connect your Eclipse IDE to a set of open issues on Redmine.



I'll assume you've already installed Mylyn in Eclipse. Start by selecting the "Window" menu and then "Show View." Click "Other..." at the bottom of the sub-menu and scroll down the dialog. Open the Mylyn folder, and select "Task Repositories."

In the new panel this creates, a context menu (right-click or control-click on most systems) will give you the option to "Add [a] Task Repository"--choose "Generic web-based access."

At this point, refer to the Redmine wiki for more details. Enter your server name in the first field--here I'll use Redmine, but your should enter your own server. Give the server a label, and provide a username and password.

Then, under "Additional Settings," open the "Advanced Configuration" dialog. The "Task URL" will be used to look up specific issues by adding the issue number. We can also define a URL to create new issues. The "Query Request URL" will return a list of open issues, and we'll use the "Query Pattern" to filter out the issue numbers and descriptions. And, of course, we need to provide a login URL, which is submitted as a POST request for Redmine.

Click "Finish" and we're done creating the repository.

Often, it's easiest to create a task query at this point, and Eclipse gives you that option. We could scroll further down on the Redmine wiki and copy the parameters that will filter the tickets down to just our own. But in this case I have no active tickets on redmine, so I won't do that.

Finish the query definition, and Mylyn will fetch a list of tasks from Redmine. To see those tasks in Eclipse, go back to "Show View" in the "Window" menu, select "other..." and choose "Task List." The task list has a nice hover state to get basic information on the tasks, and you can double-click to get more details. You can enter personal planning information, add comments and manipulate the ticket via the internal web browser, and you can establish a Mylyn context for the task. We'll cover Mylyn contexts in a separate lesson.

And that's all there is to it.

Related:
  • Redmine is a project management web application written in Ruby on Rails
  • Eclipse is an Integrated Development Environment written in Java that runs on Windows, Mac, and Unix
  • Mylyn is a plugin for Eclipse that allows developers to associate a small set of files with each of their tasks, hiding those files that are not related to the work.

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