Wiki Syntax for Your Commit Comments
Pulse has strong SCM integration, which includes showing changelist information for changes between builds. For some time, Pulse has had the ability to transform the commit comments that it displays to insert links to external systems. For example, you could link the text “bug 123″ to the summary for that bug in your issue tracking software. This is neat, as you can jump straight from Pulse to any external tool you choose to link to.
As part of Pulse 1.2, we have beefed up this system. One of our customers wanted to be able to strip redundant information from their commit comments as shown in Pulse. This led us to adding the ability to transform commit comments in more general ways than just linking. Now, you can specify an arbitrary regular expression to match and corresponding replacement text. The cool thing is that this mechanism gives you the power to do all sorts of useful transformations on your commit messages. It soon occurred to me that one very useful thing to do would be to support a Wiki-like syntax for your commit messages! For example, you can add a transformer to render text in bold when surrounded by asterixes:
Replacement: <b>$1</b>
The text between the asterixes is captured into group 1, and the replacement wraps this group with <b> tags. Now when viewing changes in Pulse, important bits stand out:
Of course, we can go much further. Linking is a good thing, so why not support turning anything that looks like a link into one? And anything that looks like an email address into a mailto: link? Here it goes:
Replacement: <a href=”$0″>$0</a>
Expression: [\w]+@[\w.]+
Replacement: <a href=”mailto:$0″>$0</a>
Now whenever someone references a useful URL, it is but a click away from the Pulse web UI:
We have really just scratched the surface here. The mechanism is flexible enough to do all sorts of weird, wonderful and (hopefully) useful things! Give Pulse a try and go nuts!
