Issues CSV

Admin → Config → Tasks → Task summary CSV → Download… issues CSV

The issues CSV described here is optional. If you’re not using it you can skip this page!

The race server produces a comma-separated values (CSV) file that describes the project tasks as issues. This can be useful if you’re encouraging your students to use an online version control system like GitHub or GitLab, and want to expose them to those systems’ use of issues.

Download the task issues in CSV format.

If you’re distributing the editor code with the autofork method (so IS_USING_GITHUB_API_TO_INJECT_ISSUES is set to Yes), the race server uses this CSV to automatically inject the issues into your students’ GitHub accounts.

The most important effect of publishing the task list is that the current tasks, and the current values of any config settings they reference, are rendered into HTML as the task list. Students work directly from this task list.

However, the publishing process also generates an “issues CSV”. The issues CSV is effectively a static file “frozen” to be in synch with the published task list. It is a CSV file with two columns:

• name and title
• problem description and link to the task on the race server (markdown)

You can customise (or suppress) the header row with the BUGGY_EDITOR_ISSUES_CSV_HEADER_ROW config setting in the “Tasks” group (that is, you can change what these columns are called), or accept the default. The default values work both with the automatic injection into GitHub described above, and also with GitLab’s import issues from CSV feature.

The file is available to download via the button on the tasks admin page, but it’s also publicly available on your race server at:

• /project/tasks/issues.csv

This might be useful if you want to automate loading of issues with an external script.

The name of each issue matches the name of the task (of course!) and the description, which is markdown text, includes a link to the task on your race server’s task list.

Remember that this CSV is updated whenever you publish the task list — so if you edit any tasks, or change any config settings that they refert to, the CSV won’t reflect those changes until you re-publish the task list. However, that the load task admin page also allows you to download the current tasks in this form, which might not be the same as the published issues (if you have edited the tasks since you last published them).

We used the auto-injection of tasks as GitHub issues into students’ editor repos to encourage them to see how that platform uses them. Most students didn’t use them — which is fine, because it’s an optional extra and we’d chosen not to make use of Git part of the module. However, for students who were on top of their programming, it provides an excellent introduction into how feature branches and even closing issues from within commit messages can work.