Administering Projects

CodeBeamer project administrators have a powerful and flexible set of administration and customization tools at their disposal. Permissions can be controlled in 3 dimensions: through roles, groups and individual members' permissions. Projects can be customized only by users having the project administrator role. This document discusses customizing and managing projects that already exist.

To create a new project, please see Managing Projects.

Project Members

To view project members and their roles:

1. Open a project,
2. Click on the Members tab.

Settings (Drag&Drop) view

In this view you can easily manage Project members and their Roles via Drag&Drop and one-click operations.

On the left side, you can see the available Roles, here you can Add a new role or Edit an existing (delete function is also available, on the Edit role page). You can filter roles by clicking the checkboxes, only the members/ groups with the checked roles will displayon the right side. Also it is able to assing a new role to a member or group if you drag the desired role and drop on the group or member you want to assign.

On the right side you can see the Groups and the Members assigned to the current project. You can edit the members / group, assign or unassign roles, and also you can remove the member / group from this project. It is able to use Drag&Drop to assign a new role to a member / group. To add new member or group to the project, please use the Add new member / Add new group buttons on the action bar.

Filter is also available here, you can filter by Role status and by name.

From codebeamer 21.09 paging was introduced by displaying Groups and Members which makes more easy and effective to handle Project Members.

Add or invite members

By adding new members to a project, the project administrator can build a collaborative project team. Each project member can have different project permissions depending upon the members' roles.

To add members to a project:

1. Open a project,
2. Click on the Members tab,
3. Click on the Add new Member link

Add new Member from codebeamer

Figure: Add Members from codeBeamer Dialog

To add a member from codeBeamer:

1. Select users from the Accounts list,
2. Pick one or more Roles to be associated with the new member,
3. Click on Add.

Description or explanation can be specified in the text area below the account chooser component which will be visible in account member history.

Add new Member from LDAP/Active Directory

This feature helps the project admins to find and add users directly from the configured LDAP/Active Directory.

This feature is disabled if the LDAP/Active Directory connection not configured properly. More information about configure LDAP/Active Directory with codeBeamer: Post-installation Configuration

Figure: Add Members from LDAP/Active Directory Dialog

To add a member from LDAP/Active directory:

1. Start search for LDAP/Active Directory users using the text field above the user result table (next to the search button)
2. Type in the email address, or a part of the email, name, account name and press enter or the search button
3. After the result loaded to the table above select the account using the checkbox at the begginning. The details of the loaded columns can be found at the end of the list.
4. Pick one or more Roles to be associated with the new member,
5. Click on Add.

LDAP/Active directory account result table column meanings:

• Account: the account name (this will be the codeBeamer username)
• State: DOES NOT EXIST/EXIST - the account is already added to codeBeamer or not.
• Email: the mapped email value (this will be the codeBeamer email)
• Account name: the account's full name (this will be the codeBeamer user's first and last name)
• Distinguish name: the distinguish name of the account

Small description or explanation can be sent to the added account(s) using the text field below the account result list (if the checkbox is checked).

Invite new Users to Project by Email

This feature can be used to invite user by email address. If the user not exists in codeBeamer the user is created and automatically added to the current project.

Figure: Invite new Users to Project by Email

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To invite users via email:

1. Add each user email in the text field at the left side (if you need more text fields press add more button)
2. Pick one or more Roles to be associated with the new member
3. Enter invitation message below the email text fields
4. Click on Add.

An invitation email is sent to every specified email address which have not already registered in the codeBeamer (otherwise same happens like the simple member adding). The invitaion email contains some basic information about the project and the invitation message:

Figure: Invitation email

To activate the registration the user should click on the activation link inside the invitation message. If the user click on the activation link a personal details form will appear:

Figure: User activation form

Using this form the invited user can finish the registration process by specify his mandatory properties in codeBeamer.

Add new Group

Figure: Add new Group

To add a group:

1. Select groups from the group list,
2. Pick one or more Roles to be associated with the new member,
3. Click on Add.

Remove members from project

To remove a member from a project:

1. Open a project
2. Click on the Members tab
3. Hover over the member you want to remove
4. Click on the button at the end of the cell
5. Click Yes on the popup message that appears

Changing a member's role:

1. Open a project,
2. Click on the Members tab,
3. Hover over the role to remove
4. Click on the button on the Role rectangle

Customizing Roles

Group level visibility and access to project information such as trackers, forums, documents, builds, SCM and source code, can be controlled using roles. Roles ensure that both internal teams and business partners only see and access the information appropriate to their respective roles. Members of the same role have the same level of access to project information. When accessing project information, the system uses the highest level of a member's access permission based on his roles and group memberships. See more about role based access permissions in Basics: Projects, Roles, Groups, Members and Users.

To customize a role:

1. Open a project
2. Click on the Members tab
3. On the left side panel, click on the wrench icon at the role you want to customize
4. Select the permissions,
5. Edit the name and description if required,
6. Click on Save.

Figure: Customize a Role

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To create a custom role:

1. Open a project,
2. Click on the Admin tab,
3. Click on the Roles tab,
4. Click on a New Role,
5. Choose the desired permissions,
6. Set the name and description of the role,
7. Click on Save.

Note that you can copy the permission settings of an existing role by selecting that role in the Base on list.

Configuring Project Options

General Options

See the options in Creating a Project.

To edit the general options:

1. Open a project,
2. Click on the Admin tab,
3. Click on the Settings menu

This page allows the System Administrators to edit various properties of the projects.

Figure: Project properties.

Meaning of fields

Name	The name uniquely identifies the project.
Key (short name)	You can use the short name when you will refer to the project home page by an URL. When the field is set to demo , you can use the URL http://demo.codebeamer.com/ to refer the project's home page.
Status	You can select from three options here. Later you can use these statuses to visualize your projects on Project Browser
Status description	Textual comments about the project status. The Status information plus the color indicator on the project name (depending on the project status) constitutes basic project information.
Begin/End	The planned project start/end date.
Estimated Budget, Cost and Time	Free-form text fields for storing your estimations about the project.
Category	Select a category of the project.
Image	You can select an icon for your projects. These icons well be used on Project Browser. The icon could come from the .codeBeamer/Project Icons directory. This directory is always visible for every user, so you can't remove the view permission from this directory (since 10.1).
Tabs in the top menu	You can control which tabs are shown in the top menu.
Membership	You can control the visibility of your project. If you choose Public then anyone can join to the project. The difference between the two Public options is that you can decide if you want to approve join requests or the process is automatic.
Membership constraints	In this field you can select some groups. If your project is public it will be open for joining only for those users that are the members of one of the selected groups. If no group is selected than any user can join.
Assign new members to Role	New members who successfully join a project, or who get Join Approval are assigned this initial role.
Participation Conditions	A short description of the project that will be shown on the join tab of the project browser.
Project Homepage	The URL of the project home site in Wiki syntax.

Delayed projects, scheduled projects and completed projects are each displayed in a distinctive color depending on the status.

Renaming Project Specific Tabs

Users can also personalize these labels in the User Preferences dialog. User preferences take precendence over project and default settings.

Project administrators can override certain labels in the top menu bar. These changes only affect the active project, labels remain the same in any other project. All project members will see these modified labels, when working within the project.

To edit a label:

1. Open a project,
2. Click on the Admin tab,
3. Click on Settings menu.
4. Find the Tabs in the top menu row.
5. Hover over any of the values. A small pencil icon appears. Click on the icon.
   
6. Modify the label.
   
7. Click on Save.

Modified labels has a small info icon. Hover over the icon to see the system default label for the tab.

Closing/Reopening Projects

Since CB-6.1, a project has the following lifecycle:

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1. To Close a project, activate the Closed checkbox after the Status description field.
2. To Reopen a closed project, simply uncheck the Closed checkbox

A Closed project is still visible, but it's content is frozen/read-only, so you can still refer to it but cannot modify anything (except Remove Project (see below) or Reopen).

Removing/Deleting Projects

Since CB-6.1, also "Remove Project..." and "Delete Project..." follows the project lifecycle (see above):

1. Upon "Remove Project...", an Open or Closed project will be marked as Deleted (this is reversible, see below).

The project and any content will not be accessible any more, only project administrators can see their deleted projects on the Deleted tab of Project Browser.

1. You can restore a logically Deleted project via "Restore Project ..." to it's original state (Open or Closed)
2. Only when you execute "Delete Project..." on a logically deleted/previously removed project, the project and all its contents will be physically deleted (irreversibly)!

• All the contents of the project (including trackers, forums and documents) are deleted.
• Source code from the server is deleted only if the source code is checked-out from a revision control system.

Otherwise the source code remains on the server's file system.

CodeBeamer will delete the project's managed repository on project deletion. It doesn't change anything in external repositories because external SCM systems have read-only access. See Using Managed Subversion,Git & Mercurial Repositories

To remove a project:

1. Open a project,
2. Click on the Admin tab,
3. Click on the General tab,
4. Click on Remove Project,
5. Confirm the removal,
6. Click on Save.

Only if you really need to physically delete a project and it's contents, and you are absolutely sure that you will never need to refer to this project again, then you should finally "Delete Project ...".
Once you confirmed that, the process is irreversible!.

Project Admin Calendar Tab

Under the Calendar tab in the Default Business Hours tab the differences from the System Admin definitions of regular working hours of the business are defined. The Starting at and Valid until fields may be used to delimit the beginnings or ends of new or soon-to-be-eliminated work schedules, for example.

If you are responsible for administering the whole codeBeamer product, you can find information on setting the codeBeamer system defaults for Business Hours and Special Calendar Days at CodeBeamer System Business Hours Calendar

Figure: Project Calendar, Default Business Hours Definition

In the Special Calendar Days tab, holidays and exceptional work hours, again that differ from the System Admin default Special Days, can be defined:

Figure: Project Calendar, Special Calendar Days

Project Admin Approval Workflows Tab

Project Admin SCM Settings

The SCM configuration page also moved. Before 5.7 you could access it by clicking on the Admin menu and selecting the SCM Settings tab. Above 5.7 there's a separate menu in the main toolbar called SCM Repositories.

The repository type, URL, synchronization, 'Managed Repository' and other settings are defined here.

Administering External SCM Access

CodeBeamer can access different external software configuration management (SCM) systems. The SCM repository must exist or it must be created manually by the SCM administrator.

codeBeamer will delete the project's managed repository Using Managed Subversion,Git & Mercurial Repositories when you change from a managed repository to another repository or to "None". Read-only access is used on external SCM systems so codeBeamer doesn't make any changes to external systems.

Figure: Choose the SCM System Type

Configuring an external CVS repository

To assign an external CVS repository to the project:

1. Open a project,
2. Click on the SCM Repositories tab,
3. Select the CVS radio button,
4. Press Configure to open the CVS repository configuration screen.

Figure: Configure for CVS Repository Access

The following are the CVS repository access parameters:

Repository Name	The name of the repository. This will be displayed on the SCM Repositories page.
Host	Used to specify repository server's host name.
Repository path	Used to specify the repository directory.
User	This field is used for user authentication of the SCM system.
Password	This field is used for user authentication of the SCM system.
Connection type	Choose one of the pserver, ext or local options.
Port	TCP/IP port address to communicate with the SCM server.
Module(s)	The name of the module(s) you are interested in. Use dot (.) to indicate all the modules from the CVS repository. You can enter one or more semicolon (;) to separate module names.
Tag/Branch	Optional field. Specify here a CVS tag or branch for filtering the source files.
Tracker SCM Loop	With these options you can set the monitored state for commits as well as the restrictions that apply for doing a commit to the managed CVS repository. For more information see the chapter Tracing Source Code Changes to Requirements, Task and Bugs.

Configuring an external Subversion repository

To assign an external Subversion repository to the project:

1. Open a project,
2. Click on the SCM Repositories tab,
3. Select the Subversionradio button,
4. Select the Use Existing External Repository radio button,
5. Enter the Subversion repository access parameters,
6. Click on Save.

Figure: Choose Internal Managed Repository or External Repository

Select external repository then click "Next".

Figure: Configuration for Access to Existing SVN Repository

These are the Subversion repository access parameters:

Configuring external Git and Mercurial repository

The fields on the external repository page arte the same for Git and Mercurial:

The meaning of the fields:

External repo access through SSH

When accessing an external repository through SSH you have two options. You can use a private and public key pair or password authentication.

For the public key authentication generate a key pair on the server where your codeBeamer instance is running and upload the public key to the server where your external repository is hosted (for the process of generating ssh keys see this page: Generating SSH keys).

To use password authentication for SSH you have to install the sshpass utility on your server. On ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install sshpass

After installing sshpass restart codeBeamer and then you can use password authentication. Whenever you create an external mercurial or git repository with an ssh url and a password provided codeBeamer will use password authentication.

Instrumenting external repositories

In order to notify codeBeamer about new commits in your external repositories you have to instrument them. The required steps are described in detail in this document: Scmloop manual

Administering a Managed Subversion Repository

CodeBeamer's internal Subversion repository is called the Managed Subversion Repository.

CodeBeamer's managed Subversion repository service is designed for distributed, Internet-based development teams. The managed repository service provides full Web-based access and access control over Subversion repositories with unified role-based access control.

With managed repositories CodeBeamer sets the project member repository permissions (view and commit) in the repository authorization file. For example, if a project member's role has the

• SCM - View permission, then the specific user will get r (read) permissions on the repository and members of roles with;
• SCM - Commit permission will give rw (read and write) permissions to the user.

If the permissions of a role are modified or a user is added to or removed from a project, the repository permissions will be automatically synchronized.

To assign a managed subversion repository to a project:

1. Open a project,
2. Click on the SCM Repositories tab,
3. Select the Subversionradio button,
4. Click on Next,
5. Select the Create New Managed Repository radio button,
6. Click on Next,
7. Enter the value for the Repository Name text field and, optionally, select a Subversion dump file if you will import an existing external Subversion repository,
8. Click on Finish.

Figure: Name the New Repository, and Optional Selection of Dump File

Synchronization with the SCM System

After the project has been created, the contents of the project's source files in the SCM repository will probably change over time. CodeBeamer supports synchronization with the SCM repository. The synchronization is typically triggered by the periodic process timer, described in Administrator's Guide. The Synchronization can also be triggered manually. The screen capture below is also shown above in the Figure "Configuration for Access to Existing SVN Repository"above.

Figure: Synchronization with SCM System.

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Code Parsing Options

Using fuzzy parsers CodeBeamer can understand the syntax of C/C++ and Java programming languages, extract programming constructs such as classes and methods, functions, variables, etc. and can establish relationships between these programming constructs. For the C/C++ parsers you can enter preprocessor directives for better parsing results.