Introduction to Oracle Developer Cloud Service Issue Tracking REST Interfaces

The task tracking system in Oracle Developer Cloud Service (DevCS) helps your team manage your development priorities and process. DevCS offers a simple web interface for working with the system. However, in some cases you might want to build your own interfaces to interact with the issues. For example, you might want to build a system for end-users to report bugs in your app and you don't want to give them direct access to the DevCS web insterface. In the August 17 update of DevCS  we introduced a set of REST services that will let you build a custom interface that will interact with our issues repository.

The official documentation for the DevCS REST services is here.

I wanted to share some tips to help you get this going in your project. The results are in this short video demo, and the details are below.

Figuring Out The End Points

The documentation gives you the basic end-points you should be calling, but it took me a little bit of time to figure out the full URL to the end point. Turns out the URL is composed in the following way:

https://server/org-id/rest/org-id+project-id/issues/v2/issues

The first parts (server/org-id) are quite easy to get - just copy it from the URL of your project when you look at it in your browser.

The org-id+project-id part is something you can get by looking at the details of your maven repository URL - see the image below - what you are looking for is the part before the /maven/ at the end:

Note that in some projects this will also include a numeric value appended to the project name. Something like developer-oracletemplates_db-oss-devops_20266.

In the video sample below the result URL for the REST that returns the list of issues currently in the system ended up being:

https://myserver/developer-oracletemplates/rest/developer-oracletemplates_adf1221/issues/v2/issues

Creating New Issues

One of the useful services is the /issues/v2/issues/create-form service. It returns a json file that you can edit to specify information about a new task that you want to create.

Note that the file start with : {"createIssue":{"links":.... Before you use the file to insert a new issue, you'll need to remove the  {"createIssue": at the start and the corresponding } at the end of the file. Only then can you use it to submit the POST operation to create an issue.

In the video I used the following command to create the issue in the DevCS:

curl -X POST -u shay@oracle.com https://myserver/developer-oracletemplates/rest/developer-oracletemplates_adf1221/issues/v2/issues/ -d@issue.json -H 'Content-type:application/json'

(the -d allows you to specify the name of the file with the new issue, and the -H specifies the content format).

Now that you have access to the information you can create new systems on top of it using your favorite development tool. At the end of the video you can see a simple issue system I built with Oracle Visual Builder Cloud Service - more on that in a future blog entry.