Use Cases

In your favourite XML editor either create a new file or open an existing status.xml file. The default location of these files within a Forrest content object is in the project root. This file should conform to one of the status.xml schemas. The root element for this document is status.

In order to attribute changes to a specific developer it is neceessary to create a developers element. Within this element you should add a single person element for each develop who works on the project.

Each action within a release is given a context to help classify changes. When reports are created the context of an action is used to create a more readable report in which similar actions are grouped together. You can specify any contexts you like within the contexts element.

Common contexts used in an software development project are:

<contexts>
 <context id="code" title="Changes to the Code Base"/>
 <context id="docs" title="Changes to Documentation"/>
 <context id="admin" title="Changes to Project Administration"/>
 <context id="design" title="Changes to Design"/>
 <context id="build" title="Changes to Build"/>
</contexts> 
          
          

Actions that describe the changed in a release are placed within a changes.

The details of each release are enclosed within a release element, so you need to create that now.

Each release can have a notes section. This is used to provide descriptive text at the start of many reports. The notes should describe the release in fairly high level detail, it should not describe any change descriptions, these will be added in the next step.

During the development cycle for the release action elements should be added for each significant contribution to the release.

If the change is of particular significance and you woul dlike it to appear in the release notes generated by the projectInfo plugin you should set the importance attribute to "high".

To generate a changelog from your status.xml file you need to request /changes.html or changes.pdf or whatever format you have enabled within Forrest using output plugins.

Note that the projectInfo plugin provides a special RSS output format of. Technically, this should not be part of an input plugin and therefore it may be moved at a later date. However, you will always be able to generate the RSS feed by requesting changes.rss.

You can generate a change log for a specific version by specifying a version number in the request, for example, changes_0.1.html.