Help
  This page is to help you learn how to use the query form.

Help Using The Bugzilla Query Form
January, 20 2001 - Brian Bober (netdemon).
Further heavy mutiliations by Tara Heranandez, April 20, 2001.

Da Ant


The Sections

The query page is broken down into the following sections:

Bug Settings
People Involved
Text Search Options
Module Options
Advanced Querying
The Bottom Of The Form

"I already know how to use Bugzilla, but would like information about Bugzilla and the author of this document."
"Ok, I am almost certain the bug I discovered isn't in Bugzilla, how do I submit the bug?" - Read the guidelines first!


Tips

You don't have to fill out any field on the query page you don't need. Filling out fields will limit your search. On the list boxes, such as Status, you can Ctrl-Click to unselect an option. Until you get better, you can use the "brute force" method where you enter a very simple query and search through the long list of bugs manually. Just try not to overuse this method if you don't have to as you might be slowing down the search for other people if there are many people searching at the same time. Finally, I would recommend learning the Boolean Chart immediately because it is extremely powerful. Also, there is a navigation bar at the bottom of most Bugzilla pages, and important links at the front page.

Back to the Query. If you typed anything in the forms already, you might want to hit back on the browser. When you are all done reading, do a sample query!


Bug Settings

Status: Resolution: Platform: OpSys: Priority: Severity:

The status and resolution field define and track the life cycle of a bug. Platform and opsys describe the system which the bug is on. Priority and Severity are for tracking purposes.

Status

Resolution

The resolution field indicates what happened to this bug.

No resolution yet: All bugs which are in one of the "open" states (meaning the state has no associated resolution) have the resolution set to blank. All other bugs will be marked with one of the following resolutions.

Platform

The platform field is the hardware platform against which the bug was reported. Legal platforms include but are not limited to:

Note: Selecting the option "All" does not select bugs assigned against all platforms. It merely selects bugs that occur on all platforms.

Operating System

The operating system field is the operating system against which the bug was reported. Legal operating systems include but are not limited to:

Note that the operating system implies the platform, but not always. For example, Linux can run on PC and Macintosh and others.

Priority

The priority field describes the importance and order in which a bug should be fixed. This field is utilized by the programmers/engineers to prioritize their work. The priorities are from P1 (Most important) to P5 (Least important).

Severity

The Severity field describes the impact of a bug.


People Involved

Email:  matching as:
Will match any of the following selected fields:
Assigned To Reporter QA Contact
CC Added comment

This section has been made more complicated in order to make it more powerful. Unfortunately, it is not the easiest to understand. What this section lets you do is search for bugs associated with a certain email address.

To search for bugs associated with an email address:

You can look for up to two different email addresses. If you specify both, then only bugs which match both emails will show up. This is useful to find bugs that were, for example, created by Ralph and assigned to Fred.

You can also use the drop down menus to specify whether you want to match addresses by doing a substring match, by using Regular Expressions, or by exactly matching a fully specified email address.


Text Search

Bug summary:
A description entry:
Associated URL:
Status whiteboard:
Keywords:

In this section, you can enter values that are searched for in all the bugs (or whatever you limit the bugs to in other fields). You might want to look at Bugzilla Text Searching to see info on Regular Expressions and text searching. The box next to these fields decides how a match will be determined.

Bug summary

This lets you search the summaries. The summary is one line that attempts to sum up the bug.

A description entry

This lets you search comments. Comments can be added by anybody. Comments are the largest searchable area in most bugs. If you really want to find a lot of matches, search the comments.
Note:Because comments can get quite extensive in bugs, doing this particular type of query can take a long time.

Associated URL

This lets you search the url field. This contains the url of the web page the bug is about.

Status Whiteboard

This lets you search the bug's status whiteboard. The status whiteboard contains general information that engineers add.

Keywords



Each bug can have keywords specified. The bug reporter or a user with the proper permissions can edit these keywords. The following is a list of the keywords that are stored on this version of Bugzilla:

Name Description Bugs


Module Options


Module options are where you select what product, module and version the bugs you want to find describe. Selecting one or more of the products, versions, components, or milestones will limit your search.

Products

Although all subprojects within the Mozilla project are similar, there are several seperate products being developed. Each product has its own components.

Product Description
CANMAPCanadian Maritime Awareness Program
CANSARP 5.0CANSARP Version 5.0 and all minor releases.
Enhancement RequestsA database for enhancements that are pending approval by SAR HQ. Once approved, this can be moved to the CANSARP product listing.
LUT SupportCCGC Argos/SLDMB Local User Terminal (LUT)
Misc SupportOther CANSARP and related SAR system support.
Validation SupportCANSARP / Model Validation

Version

This is simply the version that the bugs you want to find are marked for. Many of the bugs will be marked for another version and will have their milestones entered instead (milestones explained below).

Component

Each product has components, against which bugs can be filed. Components are parts of the product, and are assigned to a module owner. The following lists components and their associated products:

Component Product Description
GeneralCANMAPGeneral CANMAP bugs.
Drift Calculation (Calcs)CANSARP 5.0All bugs related to drifting search objects.
Effort AllocationCANSARP 5.0Allocation of effort: SRUs, search patterns, SRU manager, SRU database, Transit editor
Environmental Data SourcesCANSARP 5.0Bugs related to environmental data sources.
File ManagementCANSARP 5.0File opening, closing, duplicating, backups, etc.
GeneralCANSARP 5.0General CANSARP bugs.
GISCANSARP 5.0Issues related to the GIS and the vector map
Printing / Reports / LogsCANSARP 5.0Bugs related to CANSARP's report/print component and various logs
Search Objects / Track LinesCANSARP 5.0Search objects, the search object manager, track lines, the track line manager
ToolsCANSARP 5.0Tools such as rulers, markers and other features of tool bar.
TranslationCANSARP 5.0English/French translation problems
User Interface & ChartsCANSARP 5.0All bugs related to the User Interface and marine charts
VMSCANSARP 5.0The VMS and its related systems.
CANSARP EnhancementsEnhancement RequestsCANSARP enhancements requested RSMS.
DEC serverLUT Supporttemp
Ftp serverLUT Supporttemp
GeneralLUT SupportDefault Component.
Smartech softwareLUT Supporttemp
Smartstation antennaLUT Supporttemp
GeneralMisc SupportDefault Component.
GeneralValidation SupportDefault Component.

Milestone

Choosing this section lets you search through bugs that have their target milestones set to certain values. Milestones are kind of like versions. They are specific tentative dates where a massive phasing out of bugs occur and a relatively stable release is produced. For example, Mozilla.org had milestones in the form of "M10" or "M18", but now are in the form of "Mozilla0.9". Bugzilla milestones are in the form of "Bugzilla 2.12", "Bugzilla 2.14", etc.


Inclusion/Exclusion Options

bugs numbered:
 
Only bugs changed between and
Where one or more of the following changed:
and the result was:
 
Containing at least votes

Inclusion/Exclusion options is a powerful section that gives you the ability to include and exclude bugs based on values you enter.

[Only, Exclude] bugs numbered [text]

This lets you put in a comma-delimited list of bugs you want to have your results chosen from, or those of which you want to exclude. It would be nice in the future if you could type in ranges, i.e. [1-1000] for 1 to 1000. Unfortunately, you cannot do that as of now.

At least [text] votes

With this, you can choose how many votes - at minimum - a bug has.

Only bugs changed between

Here you can choose what dates the bugs changed. "Now" can be used as an entry. Other entries should be in yyyy-mm-dd format, or in relative dates such as 1d or 2w or 3m or 4y, which respectively mean 1 day, 2 weeks, 3 months, 4 years ago. 0d is last midnight, and 0w, 0m, 0y is the beginning of this week, month, or year.

Where one or more of the following changed, and the result was

With this you can specify which bug fields changed, and optionally to what value, between the dates specified above. Leaving blank will match any change.


Advanced Querying Using "Boolean Charts"

The Bugzilla query page is designed to be reasonably easy to use. But, with such ease of use always comes some lack of power. The Advanced Querying section is designed to let you do very powerful queries, but it's not the easiest thing to learn (or explain).

 
       

The Advanced Query (or Boolean Chart) starts with a single "term". A term is a combination of two pulldown menus and a text field. You choose items from the menus, specifying:

Field 1: Where to look for the search term
Field 2: How to determine what is a match
Field 3: What the search term is

 
OR
       

The real fun starts when you click on the "Or" or "And" buttons. If you push the "Or" button, then you get a second term right under the first one. You can then configure that term, and the result of the query will be anything that matches either of the terms.

 
 AND
 
       

You can push the "And" button, and get a new term below the original one - seperated by the word "AND", and now the result of the query will be anything that matches both sets of terms.

You can keep clicking "And" and "Or", and get a page with many terms. "Or" has higher precedence than "And". You can think of the lines of "Or" as having parenthesis around them.

 

 
       

The most subtle thing to notice is the "Add another boolean chart" button. This is almost the same thing as the "And" button. You want to use this when you use one of the fields where several items can be associated with a single bug - including: "Comments", "CC", and all the "changed [something]" entries. If you have multiple terms that all are about one of these fields (such as one comment), it's ambiguous whether they are allowed to be about different instances of that field or about only that one instance. So, to let you have it both ways, they always mean the same instance, unless the terms appear on different charts.

For example: if you search for "priority changed to P5" and "priority changed by person@addr", it will only find bugs where the given person at some time changed the priority to P5. However, if what you really want is to find all bugs where the milestone was changed at some time by the person, and someone (possibly someone else) at some time changed the milestone to P5, then you would put the two terms in two different charts.

The Rest of the Form

Load the remembered query:
Run the remembered query:
Forget the remembered query:
Remember this as the default query
Remember this query, and name it:
Sort By:

So you have gotten all that down, but "What is this junk at the bottom of the form?" You can remember the current query as the default query page that is pulled up whenever you are logged on. There is also an ability to choose how you want your results sorted. When finished, click "Submit".

About This Document

Written and adapted from some older Bugzilla documents (by Terry Weissman, Tara Hernandez and others) by Brian Bober You can talk to me on irc.mozilla.org - #mozilla, #mozwebtools, #mozillazine, I go by the name netdemon.

Lots of Bugzilla use documention is available through Mozilla.org and other sites:
How To Find Previously Reported Bugs
Bugzilla General Information
Mozilla Bug Report Form
Bugzilla Text Searching
The Bug Reporting Guidelines

My main motive for writing this was to help the engineers by giving new Bugzilla users a way to learn how to use the Bugzilla Query form. I had done a rewrite of query.cgi, so I said, "What the heck, I'll write this too".


Why Use This?

You probably looked at the Query page and said, "This page looks too difficult. Now that I think about it, I don't really need to do a query". It is important to make sure that a bug doesn't have a duplicate before submitting it, as is stated clearly in The Bug Reporting Guidelines. The people reading your bugs are busy and usually swamped with bugs. Therefore, you are doing everyone a huge favor to search for a duplicate.


Sample Query

Ok. So lets find a bug! We'll borrow the Mozilla.org database because it's handy.
First, lets make a copy of the query window so you can easily switch between this document and the query.

Do the following:

One of the results should have been bug 22775 - [RFE] AutoScroll/Panning support...