_FishEye 101 Basics

Fisheye's Windows Explorer-style interface allows you to efficiently navigate your source tree and view the depths of your repository in a structured way. Select a file to view its entire revision history.  You also have one click access to statistics, line history, commit volume, and much more.  See the documentation for more.

The 'Source' tab shows the blame information associated with every line (allowing you to pinpoint who is responsible for every change). Author and age can be displayed as an aid to annotation. See the documentation for more.

Every commit and any diff can be viewed and easily linked to. This removes ambiguity from discussions in other mediums (such as discussions held via instant messaging, wiki pages, email, issue trackers and so on). Try the side by side diff view to which gives you two panes that are synchronised horizontally and vertically, colour markers clearly show the relationship, and you can step through changes at your chosen amount of context. See the documentation for more.

The 'Activity' tab displays the changes made to the repository/branch/directory/file. Find the changes that you're seeking by filtering commits based on log message, path, author, date, branch (and other fields). This control is a snappy filter button under the Source 'Activity' tab. See the documentation for more.

This information appears as a stream on the Dashboard and other index pages, sorted chronologically showing you the latest changes. Updates can be viewed as an inline stream or RSS feed. See the documentation for more.

Click the 'Dashboard' tab to see a stream of all your own activity; your personal code commits; your reviews (if you are using Crucible) and your tracked issue updates (if you are using JIRA). See the documentation for more.

On the People index page, you can see the commit history in global lines of code (LOC) that each person has contributed (expressed as a line graph) and their total number of commits. Also, the most recent piece of activity is shown as a clickable item. See the documentation for more.

You can click on a person's name to see detailed information about their additions to the repository, showing details of their work and summaries of their activity. Additionally, you can see their work on tracked issues and code reviews if using FishEye with Crucible and JIRA integration is set up. See the documentation for more.

Every user can keep an eye on changes from RSS Feeds and Email Watches to the source directories that interest them or even individual files. The idea is to encourage people to subscribe to the level of notifications that suits them so the signal isn't lost in the noise. Here are two ways to test this out:

1. Set up a customised feed by going navigating to the 'Tools' menu in the upper right hand corner. Fill in the feed attributes and use the constraints to get data about a specific users contributions to a specific branch of code. Select to subscribe either as an RSS feed or an email watch. For fun, you can comment on their code the moment they commit until they can't take it anymore.

2. Simulate a spontaneous watch request by surfing through the directories. Once you find an interesting contribution, hit the RSS button on in the 'Tools' menu to get updated on that particular file.

See the documentation for more.

A changeset, a diff, even a specific line in a specific revision can be linked. You'll find a lot of stuff is underlined. Keep this in mind as you evaluate FishEye, there are plenty of links that are crying out to be copied to clipboard and sent on to your teammates.

If you look at the URL structure, you'll see that FishEye URLs are very predictable and hence can be easily generated by hand. There are also some extra wrinkles that are great for bookmarks.

Useful Hacks:

• Every line in an annotation is a permalink to that line, clicking the revision number in the gutter takes you to that line in the revision it was last changed (even when the line number is different). Add a post commit hook in your SCM that gives developers the FishEye link as soon as they commit.
• Using the keyword HEAD will give you the latest version of file.
• Use branch or tag names in place of revision numbers in diffs.
  See the documentation for more.

You can quickly find what you are looking for by typing one word or part of the name of what you are looking for. FishEye's Quick Nav feature will immediately show matches and suggestions below, before you've even pressed Enter or activated a proper search. Try typing a CSID to go directly to that page. See the documentation for more.

The box in the top right corner of every page can be used to quickly search the repository. Start typing and a list of suggestions will pop up to help point you in the right direction. You can also use syntax like author:anna to immediately return results which have "anna" in the author field.

See the documentation for more.

Clicking 'Query' on the navigation bar opens the Simple Search screen. Here, you have access to a wide range of powerful searching functionality including file content searching, and grouping results by changeset, revision, file or directory.

Sometimes, you need data from your repository retrieved and sorted in ways that are unique to your own situation, beyond what the pre-fab GUI can give you. From the Simple Search screen, click 'Switch to EyeQL Search'. Here, you can build searches using FishEye's powerful embedded query language, called EyeQL.

See the search documentation and EyeQL Reference Guide for more.