Swarm 2014.3: User Guide

Swarm now provides a Mark as Read button beside each file in a code review. The button helps you track whether you have reviewed a file or not. The tracking is independent for each reviewer, and automatically clears when the contents of the file changes in subsequent review updates.

See “Review display” for details.

Swarm now provides a lightweight workflow within code reviews by allowing reviewers to mark comments as tasks. Tasks can be marked as addressed, and may optionally be marked as verified.

See “Tasks” for details.

The Swarm UI now features a Show More Context row in diffs that, when clicked, fetches 10 additional lines from the associated file that are adjacent to the row (potentially fetching 20 more lines of context).

See “Diffs” for details.

When a code review is updated with modified files, any existing votes are now marked as stale. Stale votes are shown with a faded icon and do not count towards up-votes or down-votes.

See “Review display” for details.

Swarm now provides an API that daylights and documents various tasks that were previously difficult to accomplish.

The API supports:

See Swarm API for details.

If a changelist has been associated with a review, Swarm now always updates the review when the changelist's files are shelved, or when the changelist is committed. Previously, if the #review-123 or [review-123] review keyword was not present in the changelist description, the review would not have been updated.

Comment attachments are now cached by the browser for 12 hours. This decreases jumpiness when rendering attached images.

Swarm's cron script now supports starting workers on SSL-enabled Swarm hosts that utilize a self-signed certificate.

The Reviews page now updates the URL to reflect filtering of the reviews, making it easy to bookmark or share filtered review listings, and maintaining the filtered view when navigating the browser's history.

Swarm now linkifies occurrences of changelist <#> in comments and changelist descriptions.

The Swarm OVA is now built using Swarm packages. This makes upgrading the OVA to future releases much easier.

The Jobs page now updates the URL to reflect the search terms in use, making it easy to bookmark or share job searches, and maintains the search results when navigating the browser's history.

Swarm's drop-down menus can now be operated via the keyboard.

A few enhancements have been made to the JIRA module:

Swarm now has a default tab-size of 4 in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Internet Explorer does not support tab-size and continues to display a tab width of 8.

Swarm now includes a system avatar for activity not associated with a particular user, for example when tests pass or fail.

Swarm now allows changes by specific users to be ignored from the perspective of starting and updating reviews.

See “Ignored users for reviews” for more details.

Mainline branches are now listed first under the Review queue's branch filter.

SVG images are now rendered in file preview, file diffs, and comment attachments.

The #review is now more forgiving of nearby punctuation.

The #review is now more forgiving of nearby punctuation.

Swarm now automatically reverts a code review's state to Needs Review when approved reviews are updated with modified files.

Swarm adds a swarm of bees that fly around your mouse pointer on error pages. As you move your mouse, more bees surround your cursor. Over time, the bees go away if you hold your mouse still.

@mentioned jobs are now handled in a case-insensitive way.

Basic auth is now a supported means of authentication. This means that actions which previously required 2 steps (performing a login, writing the resulting cookie to a cookie jar, and then performing the actual action) can now be streamlined into a single request.

The username must match a valid user in the Perforce service with permissions to perform the action, and the password can be a valid ticket or the user's password.

The sorting of files and directories when browsing has been adjusted to position hidden (e.g. .foo) files and directories last.

For inline comments, the row will now collapse when the last open comment is archived.

Swarm maintains a variety of information in the Perforce service'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.

Perforce server version 2013.1 and higher have a configuration setting to require admin-level privileges. See “Hiding Swarm storage from regular users”.

Swarm must be installed to the root of a domain. We recommend creating a virtual host dedicated to Swarm.

LibreOffice may become unresponsive, requiring the manual removal of /tmp/OSL_PIPE_* to restore preview functionality.

Due to issues with LibreOffice's headless mode on the Mac platform, Swarm cannot display Office-type file formats if it is installed on the Mac platform.

Pre-commit reviews in a task stream are not yet supported.

We include a trigger script for both Linux/Mac and Windows; however, the Windows variant currently lacks support for the following features:

The Swarm trigger scripts (found in p4-bin/scripts) document the trigger table entries to add, making use of %quote% to surround the pathname to the script; however, %quote% is not supported on 2010.2 Perforce Servers (they are harmless though). If you're running a 2010.2 Perforce server, ensure that there are no spaces in the path to the trigger script.