April 23, 2017

RBTLIB v0.3 Update (Part 1)

  —A client-side library for Review Board.

In RBTLIB - A Client-Side Library for Review Board, I introduced RBTLIB v0.1. I'm working on RBTLIB v0.3. A big change between the first and third revision is the introduction of classes for Review Board resources.

Why this change? RBTLIB v0.3 introduces support for operations using HTTP POST. These require the client to authenticate. This means managing user credentials and the introduction of session support for POST requests.

After some experimentation I discovered that it's possible to query a Review Board instance using the simple implementation up to RBTLIB v0.2. If your Review Board instance supports anonymous access you can write a simple client to query it.

That's important as the original use case for my project was a client to report on reviews entered during a fixed time period -- something that RBTLIB v0.2 does easily. RBTLIB v0.3 exceeds my original requirement and the implementation is more complex as a result.

One more note about RBTLIB v0.2: the resource links getter is set up so that you can't provide URL parameters to the Root resource. This prevents providing parameters to the Root resource in the event that the Review Board Web API is changed to support this.