What's new in 2017.1
This section provides a summary of the notable changes in Swarm for the
2017.1 release. Full details are available in the distribution's
RELNOTES.txt
file.
Major new functionality
- Added user activity dashboard
-
The activity dashboard shows a user what reviews they need to work on next. It shows open reviews needing review where they are a reviewer, or reviews needing revisions where they are the author.
See Dashboard for details.
- Improved review filtering
-
The review queues page has had a number of new filters added to it, including filtering by comments, and filtering by votes.
See Review queues for details.
- Markdown support
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Swarm now supports markdown in comments. It is now possible to use basic styles in comment text, including bold, italics, code snippets and images. Projects can also have a README.md which is displayed on the project overview page.
See Markdown for details.
- Review cleanup
-
When a review is created, Swarm creates its own copy of the original changelist. When a review is completed, the original changelist is left open. There is now an option to clean up these unwanted changelists automatically when a review is committed.
The Swarm API now supports cleaning up historical changelists which are no longer required.
See States for details.
- Notification settings
-
The configuration of how and when mail notifications are sent out has significantly changed. It is now possible for each user to have fine grained control over when they are sent an email.
Global settings across the entire product can be set by the Swarm administrator, and individual users can customize these settings as necessary, controlling the circumstances in which they receive an email.
See Global settings for details.
- Support for PHP 7
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Swarm now runs on PHP 7, which also means it works on newer versions of Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu 16.04, that only include PHP 7. Swarm continues to work with PHP 5 as it did before.
Minor new functionality
- Alphabetical project list
-
The main list of projects on the Swarm home page now defaults to an alphabetical sort order rather than by popularity. This makes projects easier to find. The old functionality is still available via a configuration option. See Projects for details.
Drop down menus now also sort projects alphabetically by name, rather than by id.
- Email headers
-
Emails sent out by Swarm now make better use of email headers to improve threading in mail clients and to allow easier filtering into email folders.
Every email has a custom header that lists the projects that the notification email applies to, as well as using In-Reply-To header to allow threading by review.
See Email configuration for details.
- Change review author
-
It is now possible to change the author of a review. Should the original author leave the project or if the work passes to another developer, then the review author can be updated so that the review will appear in the new author's dashboard.
See Changing the review author for details.
- @mention dropdown in comments
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When a user @mentions another user in a comment, a list of users is now provided via a dropdown menu. This helps ensure that the right person is notified.
See Comment mentions for details.
- Security improvements
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Administrators now have the option to remove the Groups tab so that non-Administrator users cannot see it.
Private projects are now hidden from admin users who aren't also members of the project. Only super users have the ability to see all private projects.
- Global white space
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It is now possible to toggle whitespace settings for all files in a review with a single button click.
- API updated to v6
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A number of new endpoints have been added to the API, and it has been updated to v6.
See API Endpoints for details.
Known limitations
- Access Control
-
Swarm maintains a variety of information in the Helix Versioning Engine's keys facility. By default, users with list-level privileges can read these keys, which can include comments that contain excerpts of code they may not normally have access to.
The Helix Versioning Engine, version 2013.1/659207 or higher, has a configuration setting to require admin-level privileges for access to read and write keys. See Hiding Swarm storage from regular users.
- Task Stream Reviews
-
Pre-commit reviews in a task stream are not yet supported.