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Issue assignment, issue watchers and issue visibility

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Gemini 3.5.4

Our Gemini installation is used by both internal staff and external customers, contractors, etc. We have two visibility settings used for the vast bulk of issues - the default global group "Everyone" and another I defined ("All Internal Staff") which is only visible to, well, all internal staff. All projects have their default issue and comment visibilities set to the latter as a fail-safe way of ensuring that items for internal consumption are not accidentally made visible to everyone.

Recently, an external contractor noticed that an issue that had been assigned to him did not appear in the issue list nor in his "My Work" list. This was because the visibility was set to All Internal Staff, but it did not prevent him accessing the issue through the link on the email notification he received.

There is an inconsistency, however, between the My Work and My Watched Issues lists, as the same issue will appear in the latter list.

In a way, I can understand the issue not appearing in My Work - after all, the attribute is called visibility, not access permissions, and, while it's not preventing access, it is making it invisible! On the other hand, if something is assigned to a user, it's reasonable to expect it to be visible to them (and, inevitably, users won't think to check the visibility setting...). Not having assigned issues appear in the issues listings or issue statistics is misleading.

Could the project issue statistics, issue lists and My Work be made to work more like the My Watched issues list, by including issues outside the user's visibility settings but that are assigned to them?

Cheers,
Nigel.
nharris
· 1 		nharris
Wednesday, February 10, 2010, 1:08:02 PM
Replies (4)
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Nigel, are you saying that an issue that shouldn't be visible to a user is via the my watched issues and the user received an alert about it and he was able to see the issue?

Does he have the "only view own issues" permission?
Saar Cohen
· 5000 		Saar Cohen
Wednesday, February 10, 2010, 10:17:02 PM
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Right - though whether he should be able to see it is open to question, as it is assigned to him...

To clarify, the steps to reproduce are:

  1. User is external
  2. Issue's visibility is "All Internal Users"
  3. User cannot see the issue in project issue list, My Work or My Watched Issues
  4. Assign issue to user
  5. User receives email notification of assignment
  6. Clicking the link in the notification email allows him to see the issue, but:
  7. Issue is not counted in that user's view of project statistics and is not visible in the project issue list nor in My Work
  8. It is visible, however, in My Watched Issues
I also have version 3.6.0 installed on a test server so I've tried it out there and the situation is different. There, the external user is not automatically added to the watch list when the issue is assigned to them (I assume it checks the visibility before doing so, as a user who can see it is added to the watch list...?) and they are unable to open the issue using a link to it. If, however, they are manually added to the watch list, the issue does appear in their My Watched Issues list, but again they can't open it up.

So, still an inconsistent situation in 3.6.0 and, worse, an issue that has been assigned to the individual cannot be viewed by them! Granted it's a murky area, given the conflict between visibility and assignment, but it seems pretty dumb to the user who just wants to pass the issue to the external user. Fortunately, we don't generally use visibility groups for issue workers/developers/managers/whatever, otherwise we could be having this problem all the time.

I guess the ultimate solution would be to check the assigned user's permissions to the issue when someone else assigns it to them and, if they can't see it, tell the user that, giving them options to change the visibility or cancel the assignment.

Regards,
Nigel.
nharris
· 1 		nharris
Thursday, February 11, 2010, 1:12:22 PM
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Ok, it seems that this was a bug in 3.5.4. The user should not be able to see that issue.
I understand what you are after but it goes against all security settings. But as you've said if someone is assigned to an issue he probably should see it, so it might be good to put a message when something like this happens (when the edit / create is submitted). We will take this on board.
Mark Wing
· 9108 		Mark Wing
Friday, February 12, 2010, 10:02:07 AM
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OK - though this also needs to be done when someone is manually added to the watch list to avoid the conflict where the issue appears in their "My Watches" list, yet they're unable to view it.
nharris
· 1 		nharris
Friday, February 12, 2010, 10:55:40 AM