Jun
04
[fixx hacks] The Upcoming API
We, here at the lab, appreciate the value of letting the user hack out their own solutions to problems that they may have stumbled upon that don't fit our vision. There's barely a day goes by that you won't hear Mark suggest a rubbish new feature, get instantly shot down, and then insist that he'll write a Greasemonkey script for that functionality anyway.
With this in mind, the fixx team have always maintained that there will be a fixx API, so that developers may adapt fixx to meet their bug tracking needs. While still in relatively early stages, that API is coming together and you can check out the progress in the beta by going to any issues screen and appending .xml or .json to the URI (/issues.json, for example). This was still mostly unusable (unless you want to jump through some pretty hefty hoops), until recently when Sarat committed a change to allow basic HTTP authentication. This change is not available to the masses yet, however, to show off its potential usefulness, I've put together a quick shell one-liner to get the number of issues assigned to me:
curl -u user:password http://SERVER/issues.xml?qAssignedTo=19 | xmlstarlet sel -t -v "count(//issue)"
Which when fed into conky, an ace Linux desktop text rendering app, leaves you with a widget that looks a bit like this:
Useless? yes. Limited? Of course. But if this divvy can use it, you won't have any trouble whatsoever.
posted by Simon Scarfe on June 4, 2008 at 12:02 p.m.
