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What is an Issue Connector?
Issue Connectors link issues from commit/checkin messages to your issue tracking system. They work by detecting an issue id in your commit messages and creating a hyperlink within the Continua CI environment to your issue tracking system.
Linking Commit/Checkin Issue Fixes
When Continua gets the latest changesets from your source repository, it automatically retrieves all commit/checkin messages associated with that changeset. If your source repository is linked to an issue connector then it will also try to parse the commit/checkin messages for issue Ids. It will then take those issue Ids from the commit message and generate a hyperlink to that issue in your issue tracking system. The list of hyperlinks will be displayed in the "Issues" tab when viewing a build. Issue Connectors do not interact with your issue tracking system, they just generate hyperlinks to it! It won't open or close issues or require any kind of login to your system.
Why use an Issue Connector?
Lets say you have set up a Repository Trigger so every time a check in is made, the configuration is built. Every time a configuration is built, the build always knows about the latest changeset, or in this case, the changeset that triggered the build. If your company's policy is to have meaningful commit messages that reference your issue tracking system, then an Issue Connector will link Continua to it. With an Issue Connector, you can give it a regular expression to retrieve the issue Id and other information from the commit/checkin message and use this information to create hyperlinks to a specific issue.
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Assume a user commits something to the repository with the message "Fixed annoying deadlock bug, solves issue #29981". The Commit Message Regex in this example extracts any number that is preceded by the # (Hash) symbol. The Issue Connector would extract the value "29981" out of the commit message and use the Issue Server URL to generate the link "http://www.issues.com/issue/29981".
Link an Issue Connector to a Repository
Once an Issue Connector has been created, it needs to be linked to a repository. An Issue Connector can be linked by editing a repository and selecting the correct Issue Connector in the Issue Connector dropdown. Once the repository has been saved, the Issue Connector will monitor any repository commits.
Creating and Editing Issue Connector
Issue Connectors can be created and edited in the Administration area, under the Continuous Integration section. On the Issue Connectors page you should see several default issue connectors that have already been created. These issue connectors link to some of the major issue tracking / repository hosting systems and they should work with most of these systems out of the box.
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New Issue Connectors can be created through the [Create] link at the top of the page, or existing issue connectors can be edited through the [Edit] links. Both these links will bring up the Issue Connector dialog:
Name
The Name of the issue connector is used to reference specific issue connectors when adding an issue connector to a repository.
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Note that if any of the tags in the table above have been used in the Issue Server URL then the validation link will not point to the right location. The reason for this is that these repository tags need a repository to work. On validation, these tags will be generate dummy information such as www.yourepositoryurl.com.
Issue Connector Rules and Restrictions
All Named Groups in the Commit Message Regex must have at least 1 matching group in the Issue Server URL
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