4.3.2 Individual field configuration

Each type of field in a PR must be described with a field section in the dbconfig file. These sections have the following general structure:

field "fieldname" {
  description "string"
  [ field-options ... ]
  datatype [ datatype-options ... ]
  [ on-change { edit-options ... } ]
}

fieldname is used as the field header in the PR. The characters > and : are used internally as field markers by GNATS, so they must not be used in fieldnames.

The order in which the field sections appear in the dbconfig file determines the order in which they appear in the PR text. There is no required order, unlike previous versions of GNATS — the Unformatted field and multitext fields may appear anywhere in the PR.

The following field-options may be present within a field section:

builtin-name  "name"

Indicates that this field corresponds to one of the GNATS built-in fields.

GNATS has several fields which are required to be present in a PR, and this option is used to map their external descriptions to their internal usage. The external field names are:

arrival-date

The arrival date of the PR

audit-trail

The audit-trail recording changes to the PR

category

The category that the PR falls into

closed-date

The date that the PR was closed

confidential

If set to yes, the PR is confidential

description

A description of the problem

last-modified

The date the PR was last modified

number

The PR’s unique numeric identifier

originator

The originator of the PR

priority

Priority of the PR

responsible

The person responsible for handling the PR

severity

Severity of the problem described by the PR

state

The current state of the PR

submitter-id

The user that submitted the PR

synopsis

The one-line description of the PR

unformatted

PR text which cannot be parsed and associated with other fields.

For these built-in fields, a matching field description must appear in the dbconfig file. Otherwise, the configuration will be considered invalid, and errors will be generated from the GNATS clients and gnatsd. We also recommend that you leave the actual fieldnames of these fields at their default values (i.e. capitalized versions of their built-in names), since some clients may depend on these names.

description  "description text"

A one-line human-readable description of the field. Clients can use this string to describe the field in a help dialog. The string is returned from the FDSC command in gnatsd and is also available via the --field-description option in query-pr.

This entry must be present in the field description, and there is no default value.

query-default  exact-regexp | inexact-regexp

Used to specify the default type of searches performed on this field. This is used when the ^ search operator appears in a query, and is also used for queries in query-pr that use the old --field query options.

If the option is not given, the default search is exact-regexp.

textsearch

If this option is present, the field will be searched when the user performs a --text search from query-pr. The field is also flagged as a textsearch field in the set of field flags returned by the FIELDFLAGS command in gnatsd.

By default, fields are not marked as textsearch fields.

read-only

When this option is present, the field contents may not be edited — they must be set when the PR is initially created. In general, this should only be used for fields that are given as internal values rather than fields supplied by the user.

By default, editing is allowed.