Using the bug_mentor field with the Bugzilla REST API to get mentored bugs

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.
Updated June 23rd, 2014:

There's a better way to query the data. See the update blog post.

Bugzilla grew a mentor field recently. This is really fantastic as it solves some interesting problems and makes it easier to track various aspects of mentoring which have been previously difficult to track. Yay to everyone involved in making that happen!

Migrating from the old way (sticking [mentor=xxx] in the whiteboard field) to the new way caused a problem that I spent a while working on today. I heard reports of other people having the same problem, hence this blog post.

There are a bunch of Bugzilla-symbiotic systems which would show a list of mentored bugs by checking to see if the string mentor= was in the whiteboard field. That no longer works. Instead we have to check to see if the bug_mentor field is empty. However, this is difficult to express with the old Bugzilla REST API (BzAPI).

The bug_mentor field is unique in that it holds email addresses which have the @ in them. So we can (ab)use this property by seeing if the bug_mentor field contains the @ character.

I did this with the GetInvolved/input.mozilla.org page. Here is the diff in case that's helpful.

Here's some Python that shows this with the old BzAPI and the new BMO API which pulls mentored bugs for Input:

import requests

# Using the old BzAPI: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bugzilla:REST_API
r = requests.get(
    'https://api-dev.bugzilla.mozilla.org/latest' +
    '/bug?product=Input&bug_mentor_type=contains&bug_mentor=@'
)
data = r.json()
print len(data['bugs'])  # Prints 9


# Using the new BMO API. https://wiki.mozilla.org/BMO/REST
r = requests.get(
    'https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/rest' +
    '/bug?product=Input&bug_mentor_type=substring&bug_mentor=@'
)
data = r.json()
print len(data['bugs'])  # Prints 9
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