Add comment field to time booking of ticket related tracker aka. revert your additions

[tvdeyen]

As a user that started a time tracker for an particular issue, I want to enter a comment while booking the time.

Or even better revert the behaviour to the old one, before you forked and took over the development of this plugin:

After stopping the time tracker just redirect to the standard redmine time booking form. So you don't need to add any extra fancy javascript dialogs and duplicate the redmine booking form.

Why did you changed this behaviour anyway? I really must say, that you made too much changes to this plugin. Reports are nice and such, but duplicating the default redmine behaviour just to have a fancy booking dialog is too much IHMO.

Please consider to revert these changes back to the default and well known behaviour.

[jume-dev]

I wasn't involved in the development at this point in time as the decision was made, but if i remember correctly, the plan was to replace the standard redmine timetracking. One of the reasons was that redmine itself only supports time tracking in hours.

[tvdeyen]

Redmine time booking works well as it is right now. It is possible to book 0.25 and 0.5 hours of time. We used this plugin in an older version for several years. After updating it to latest version it changed a lot of behaviour.

Not good, IMHO.

Redmine has good and sufficient time booking capabilities build right in.

There is no need to change it.

[tvdeyen]

I just encountered another downside with this custom dialog:

• Having customs fields for time entries (a core feature of redmine)

These fields also do not appear in the dialog.

[dennisreimers]

+1

[mstarke]

Redmine time booking works well as it is right now. It is possible to book 0.25 and 0.5 hours of time. We used this plugin in an older version for several years. After updating it to latest version it changed a lot of behaviour.

Indeed this is possible.

Not good, IMHO.

You are entitled to have your opinion. But consider ours as well ;)

Redmine has good and sufficient time booking capabilities build right in.

Nope. At least not for us. Redmine is unable to track any time to a project. This might happen for us since we do not create tickets for all stuff. To work with this downside we created the model the way we wanted to track time.

There is no need to change it.

The above was reason enough for us. It's sometimes baffeling to me that simply because this plugin is a fork active in develeopment it has to everything just like the old one did. It doesnt. It's rather different and we explicitly say so. There might be different forks that stay more "true to the old one" so take a look at those, or just simply keep using the old one since it seems to work just like you want it to. Do not take this the wrong way, we like input and opinions but the main goal for this plugin is to enhance our workflow. And we are aware that others have different needs and we simply cannot make a one-fits-all solution. But as @arBmind mentioned: We are happy for any contributions that enhance the compatiblity and maintain the feature set. So if you come up with a solution that allows for bookings without projects in redmine's core, we'd love you to show it to us!

[tvdeyen]

Ok, I can understand your point, but then please rename the plugin.
Former users of this plugin may be confused.

[mstarke]

If one is able to install a Redmine plugin I think one shall be able to understand and read a README. It's fair to assume that one does not simply install anything that comes along without at least a bit of research. But a rename might help people like you to not fall into any traps.

And I got to correct me: Redmine does allow booking on projects, but we decided to support a workflow that just tracks time, without any association whatsoever, and the the user should be able to book this time. This also comes in handy, if you delete a booking, since you do not loose your spent time, it merely gets unassigned.

[tvdeyen]

Ok, I can totally understand the need for that case. Actually we are also on the research for such solution: Booking time for whatever and then be able to decide where to book the time. Legit.

But to make this solution work properly some things are missing:

We have custom fields on Redmines TimeEntry we need for our reportings.

So, it would be great, that if the time tracking was started for a particular issue, the booking overlay would load the comment field and custom fields for that issue. Then we would have a suitable solution that works for both cases.

[jume-dev]

As i told in #164, better redmine timetrackings integration is already planned, but i can't tell you when it will be added. Its kinda like soon(tm).
Same here, pull requests are always nice to see.

[jume-dev]

While we don't have that feature implemented yet, we have a new version of this plugin, where it will be way easier to add such behavior. I created an issue there for time entry custom fields .

About that booking dialog, i am not sure, if we really want this. I don't like that dialog, but it was needed cause activities are mandatory. So ideally we would replace that dialog with another solution, not sure whch though. If you some how still want this and have an idea, feel free to create an issue in the new repo.