How to Write Scripts and Triggers in TrackStudio

TrackStudio has a wide scope of applicability. The basic principles of this system are its universality and scalability. No matter how complex and difficult your business-process is, there is always a way out for executing it in TrackStudio. May be, the obtained result is not as elegant as in specially designed systems for the required task (if it does exist at all), and more or less, this is a good working tool.

Additional functionality in TrackStudio can be implemented with the help of scripts and triggers. Scripts generally correspond to different types of computable custom fields. Triggers correspond to the events, taking place with the tasks, particularly: creation of tasks, their editing and executing other operations with the tasks. Scripts are executed every time while viewing the task, when value of the field is to be displayed, and triggers are executed when associated actions are executed.

Scripts and triggers can be of two types: interpretable and complied. Interpretable scripts are the java-code, processed by the interpreter Beanshell. It is a bit easier to write these types of scripts, as they do not require datatype matching and presence of JDK is also not required for compilation.
Compiled scripts have many advantages:

• first of all, they are executed faster as there is no need to load them and initialize the interpreter
• secondly, if the script is compiled then it is sure that there is no syntax error in it
• and thirdly, you can use the entire capabilities of Java in the compiled scripts. For example, inheritance and static variables

How to write Scripts and Triggers?

For writing and compiling the scripts and triggers, you will require:

JDK (java development kit), which can be downloaded from the website http://java.com (see that it is JDK and not JRE)
You will need the file trackstudio.jar (located in /webapps/TrackStudio/WEB-INF/lib/trackstudio.jar), which is available in any version of TrackStudio package. It would be better, if you use some IDE, e.g. IDEA, Eclipse or Netbeans

All the scripts and triggers must implement one of the following triggers:

Besides, complied scripts must remain in the packages in conformity with the structure of folders inside plugin in TrackStudio. For example, for the script, implementing the trigger Before Add Message the path must be

And correspondingly the package scripts.before_add_message

package scripts.before_add_message;

import com.trackstudio.exception.GranException;
import com.trackstudio.exception.UserException;
import com.trackstudio.external.OperationTrigger;
import com.trackstudio.secured.SecuredMessageTriggerBean;
import com.trackstudio.tools.textfilter.HTMLEncoder;

public class CheckSpentTimeScript implements OperationTrigger {
    public static final int TIME_LIMIT = 1; /** time limit in milliseconds */
    public static final int K = 20; /** conversion factors */
    @Override
    public SecuredMessageTriggerBean execute(SecuredMessageTriggerBean message) throws GranException {
        String desc = HTMLEncoder.stripHtmlTags(message.getDescription());
        if (message.getHrs() != null && message.getHrs() > TIME_LIMIT && desc.length()/message.getHrs() < K){
            throw new UserException("Please "+ message.getSubmitter().getName()+", describe what you did at that time!");
        }
        return message;
    }
}

This script can be compiled by the command

javac -cp path/trackstudio.jar CheckSpentTimeScript.java

But it is better to use some IDE.
Further, either save the obtained class in the folder ./etc/plugins/scripts/before_add_message/, or create jar

cd ../../
jar cf myscripts.jar scripts

And save in the folder ./etc/plugins/scripts.