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CollabNet Desktop - Known Issues

The current release is 1.2. For a list of changes read the New and Noteworthy page.

Mylyn Connectors
  A list of open/closed bugs for Mylyn can be obtained by visiting their web site. http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/bugs/

Project Tracker Connector
  The Project Tracker connector was tested with all of the artifact types that are included with the CollabNet ALM Templates. It is possible that not all user-created artifact types will be supported correctly. In general, the Mylyn connector prefers that an artifact type has all of the following fields:
  • A summary field named "summary"
  • A description field named "description"
  • A priority field named "priority"
  • A status field named "status"
We attempt to find suitable replacements when an exact match is not found, but this is far from fool-proof.
  Other known issues in the Project Tracker connector:
  • There is no support for attribute groupings. This feature is not currently exposed via the web services API.
  • Dependency rules based on the status field are not currently supported. The 1.1 release did add support for dependency rules for single and multi-select fields, as well as required field validation.
  • Users cannot be added and removed at the same time from a user attribute field.
  • Unable to set a number/date field back to empty due to a limitation in the web services API. As a workaround, the user can set the value of the field to 0.
  • Unable to display CJK characters.
  • Cross-project queries are not supported.
  • Ad-hoc and personal queries are not supported.
  • Correct fields not displayed or update fails after an update. Mylyn caches artifact information locally. If the artifact type is changed, you might need to force the cache to update. Delete the artifact from your task list to delete the cached information. The artifact will remain in the list. Just open it again or Synchronize to get fresh information from the server.
  • No support for selecting users from a list when adding to user attributes.

Issue Tracker Connector (Issuezilla)
  Here are the known issues with the Issue Tracker connector:
  • Anonymous access is not supported.
  • User must have logged in to web application at least one time, before the Issue Tracker connector will work properly. Just one time ever, not per day.
  • New issues cannot be entered when Mylyn 2.1.0 is installed. CollabNet Desktop 1.1.0.1 was released on November 26, 2007 and contains a fix for this problem.

SourceForge Enterprise Edition Tracker
  Here are the known issues with the SourceForge Enterprise Edition connector:
  • Anonymous access is not supported.
  • Artifact attachments require 4.4 SP1.
  • Artifacts modified from Eclipse will often report that the description was changed, even when it was not. An issue for the server API has been entered [artf26257].
  • Changes to the associations of an artifact do not always show up. This is because association changes do not change the last modified time of the artifact. The editor allows you to force a synchronization of associations, and changes will show up the next time the artifact is modified.
  • Entering a new artifact from Eclipse, the editor does not know the transition rules. Once the artifact is entered this is not an issue. An issue for the server API has been entered [artf26314].

CollabNet CUBiT
  CollabNet CUBiT uses the SSH client included with Eclipse. The SSH Terminal comes from the Eclipse DSDP/TM project. See http://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm/. There are no known issues with the CollabNet CUBiT plug-in.

This plug-in does require that Eclipse is run with a Java 1.5 or later JVM. If you are using a 1.4 JVM, the CollabNet CUBiT plug-in will appear to not be installed.

CollabNet Subversion
  Subclipse 1.2.4 is included. You can view the open/closed issues for Subclipse at this URL: http://subclipse.tigris.org/roadmap.html

openCollabNet Integration
  There are no known issues with the openCollabNet integration.

Apache Axis Issues
  When it came time to rollout the SFEE connector we noticed some weird problems where it would not work. We saw these occasionally during development but chalked them up to runtime weirdness. We finally got to the root of the problem. There are some classloading issues internally with Apache Axis that show up when there is more than one Eclipse plugin that uses Axis (Project Tracker also uses Axis). Here is a list of relevant Eclipse bugs:

We tried several approaches. The end result we settled on is that we created a com.collabnet.webservices.common bundle which contains Apache Axis 1.4 and its dependent JAR's. We then put our CEE and SFEE WS API into their own bundles and adjusted the dependencies on the core and ui plugins accordingly. This allowed us to get our CEE and SFEE implementation to share a single version of Axis and also allows us to develop more plugins in the future that need to use our API.

We had to use an Eclipse OSGI feature called "Buddy Loading" to make this work. The main issue is that Axis uses callbacks for things like authentication credentials. The buddy loading feature allows us to make sure that when Eclipse creates a classloader to load the Axis bundle that it also includes our Mylyn core and ui plugins in the classloader. If we did not do this, then the callback function would not be found by the Axis classloader.

We think it is still possible for a 3rd party plugin that contains Axis to make things break again. This seems to have something to do with a low-level JVM issue related to classloaders. As long as these plugins include the mail.jar and activation.jar classes with their version of Axis it should work. If they do not, then it messes up Axis and we will get various classloading errors. Unfortunately it appears that the only solution is to get all Eclipse plugins to behave and coexist and be aware of the issues. The Mylyn team has updated the two plugins they provide that use Axis to behave, and they have tested them with our plugins with success.