Work Item hyperlinks

The Hyperlinks section the Work Item editor provides a means to link a Work Item to any kind of online resource via a URL. For example, you might link to relevant Wiki pages or Documents, or to repository folders and files in your Polarion portal, or to pertinent information on the web or your organization's intranet. When creating a hyperlink to any resource, you can specify whether it is an internal or external resource.

Hyperlinks are supplemental to the traceability links you create between Work Items. For traceability, you should always link Work Items to each other with an appropriate link role, and not use the Hyperlinks feature. Hyperlinks are disregarded by analysis features such as Traceability and Impact Analysis. If you want Work Items and Revisions to be available for analysis processes, do not use hyperlinks to link them as generic URLs.

Tip:

Hyperlinks can also be configured so that they appear in the Work Item Properties sidebar.

Usage Examples

Example 1: For a Work Item which is a Task requiring the delivery of some document and storing it in the Subversion repository (i.e. not keeping it just as an attachment to this Work Item, but let it live in some other location), you can create a hyperlink to the actual storage of the document once it is created. For example: http://myserver.company.com/repos/documents/text.doc.

Example 2: Link to any resource on the Internet. For example, link to Internet pages that are relevant to topics discussed in comments, so that everybody can easily refer to them. So a comment might say something like "this feature should be essentially like Their Product's Foo Bar functionality". Then a hyperlink can be added to linking to, for example, http://acompetitor.com/their_product/features/foobar.html.

Example 3: Link to some resource in your Polarion repository and open it in the Repository Browser, for example, http://polarionhost.company.com/polarion/repo/someFolder leads to the Repository Browser's info view of the specified folder. Any hyperlink URL that appears to be a repository URL (starting with values specified in the system configuration property repo or repo.ui) is rendered as a repository URL and the link opens in the Repository Browser tool.

Hyperlink roles

Hyperlink Roles are meant to help categorize hyperlinks, something like the Title for attachments. Currently Polarion does not rely on them in any way. Roles are completely configurable in the The intent behind the default configuration is that refers internally is for links to the Subversion repository, while refers externally is for linking to the Internet or systems outside Polarion/SVN. Hyperlink Role is really just a label.

Hyperlink Roles are meant to help categorize and label hyperlinks, something like the Title for attachments. Currently Polarion does not rely on them in any way. Roles are completely configurable in the Administration interface (Work Items Enumerations hyperlink-roles-enum).

The default configuration contains two roles:

Refers internally: For links to the Subversion repository.
Refers externally: For linking to the internet or systems outside Polarion/SVN.

Hyperlink types

There are two types of hyperlinks:

URL: Links to an online resource that is not in the Subversion repository.
Repository URL: Links to a resource in the Subversion repository.

Create a Hyperlink

You can create a hyperlink in the Work Item Editor when the Work Item is in edit mode or by clicking the Edit button in the Hyperlinks section when the item is in View mode.

You must specify three things:

The hyperlink role (see Hyperlink Roles ).
The hyperlink URL type (see Hyperlink Types ).
The actual URL of the hyperlink.

The user interface presents combo box controls for setting the role and the type.

When hyperlinking to an online/external resource, select URL in the Type field and enter the URL in the text box to the right of the combo box.

When hyperlinking to a Subversion URL, select Repository URL in the Type field. The (Select Repository URL) icon appears at the right side of the URL text box. Click this icon to display a picker dialog in which you can browse the repository, and select the URL you want as the hyperlink target. The selected URL appears in the URL text box.