david

105: It's not obvious how to review without contextual comments

david
david
 david
Oct. 8, 2007 
It's possible for people to open up the comment/review dialog to
add a general comment without any contextual comments by clicking
on any line number and skipping to the review page, but this isn't
obvious.  A number of people have gotten tripped up by this, so we
need to figure out some UI to make this easier.
david
#1 david
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#2 alan.f******@gmai***** (Google Code) (Is this you? Claim this profile.) 
As I mentioned in the reviewboard discussion group <a
href="http://groups.google.com/group/reviewboard/t/c47e459b14f28590">here</a>, one
alternative is to decouple the "Ship it" control from the commenting, and make the
comments into a more light-weight item than a review.

Then you could simply put an "Add a comment" link on the review request page. You
could still use the same mechanism on the view diff page to allow comments on
specific code. Comments would not need to be "published", saving would make them
immediately visible. Of course, the "ship it" check would need to be moved outside
the commenting because it would mean that reviewers would make many comments, not
just the one "review"

Its not just the general commenting that people get tripped up on, many of my
colleagues have also been tripped up by not publishing their review, and being
confused as to why their comments aren't appearing.
#3 PNC****@gmai***** (Google Code) (Is this you? Claim this profile.) 
I agree with the above commenter.  It is weird to pick a random line to review just
to add a comment.
#4 van***@gmai***** (Google Code) (Is this you? Claim this profile.) 
+1 for this, since I was one of the people that just had a hard time figuring this
out. :-)

For an easy solution, why isn't there an "Add comment" link to the actual review
description, like there is for the comments below? (Same suggestion as Alan, I guess.)

On top of it, I had another issue: I added a comment to a previously existing comment
(by using the "Add comment" link) and then went to the View Diff page to be able to
add a general comment about the review; but then I had to submit both as separate
(clicking "Publish" on the main page didn't publish my comment added to the review on
the View Diff page, I had to manually go there again and click the "Publish" button).
david
#5 david
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    +david
david
#6 david 
I've just committed a change (see http://reviews.review-board.org/r/164/ for details)
that adds a "Review" link to the header of the diff view, which should fix this problem.
  • -Started
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