Individual field configuration

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4.3.2 Individual field configuration

Each type of field in a PR must be described with a field section in the dbconfig file. These sections have the following general structure:

     field "fieldname" {
       description "string"
       [ field-options ... ]
       datatype [ datatype-options ... ]
       [ on-change { edit-options ... } ]
     }

fieldname is used as the field header in the PR. The characters > and : are used internally as field markers by gnats, so they must not be used in fieldnames.

The order in which the field sections appear in the dbconfig file determines the order in which they appear in the PR text. There is no required order, unlike previous versions of gnats — the Unformatted field and multitext fields may appear anywhere in the PR.

The following field-options may be present within a field section:

builtin-name "name"

Indicates that this field corresponds to one of the gnats built-in fields.

gnats has several fields which are required to be present in a PR, and this option is used to map their external descriptions to their internal usage. The external field names are:

arrival-date: The arrival date of the PR
audit-trail: The audit-trail recording changes to the PR
category: The category that the PR falls into
closed-date: The date that the PR was closed
confidential: If set to yes, the PR is confidential
description: <