Inline Comments for Pull Requests and Commits

3 posts · Aug 2011 – Jun 2024

What this trail covers

Bitbucket Cloud supports inline comments on pull requests and commits, allowing developers to provide line-specific feedback during code reviews. This feature addresses 'comment drift' caused by subsequent commits by implementing algorithms to track comment relevance and display them even when lines change or are removed. Performance optimizations include reducing SQL queries, simplifying activity tab logic, implementing template caching, and separating slow-loading diffs from general comments. The new UI introduces a tabular design with a prominent activity feed and a dedicated diff tab for full-screen code review, inspired by Bitbucket Data Center.

All Atlassian trails

Jun 2024New in Bitbucket: Focus on recent code changes with iterative reviewIntroduces 'Iterative review' for pull requests, allowing reviewers to focus on new commits since their last review. This feature adds a dropdown to the 'Files changed' tab to select diff views ('All changes', 'Changes since last review', or specific commits). Comments made in 'Changes since last review' mode are associated with that diff range. The feature has limitations with merge commits and destructive force pushes.
May 2024Introducing A new Bitbucket pull request experienceThis post introduces a new tabular UI for Bitbucket Cloud pull requests, moving the activity feed to a prominent 'Overview' tab and dedicating a 'Files changed' tab for code review. The activity feed now includes comment threads with code context, and the diff view offers full-screen code review with a collapsible file tree. The new layout is inspired by Bitbucket Data Center and is available on an opt-in basis, with a full rollout planned for June 10.
Oct 2023Stay focused by marking PR files as reviewedIntroduces the ability to mark files as viewed within a pull request, which collapses them and persists their state across sessions. New commits to the source branch reset the 'viewed' state for marked files. A progress bar at the top of the PR indicates review completion.
Oct 2012Building Inline Comments for Pull Requests and CommitsThis post details the implementation of inline comments for pull requests and commits in Bitbucket. It describes the challenges of 'comment drift' and 'eclipsed' comments, and outlines the complex algorithms developed to handle these scenarios, including 'meta-diffs' for calculating drift on added, removed, and context lines. Performance improvements are also discussed, such as reducing SQL queries with select_related, simplifying activity tab event generation, implementing template fragment caching, and separating diff rendering.
Aug 2011Now with Code Commenting and MentionsIntroduced threaded commenting for pull requests and changesets, enabling conversations around specific code lines. Added @mentions for direct user notification and improved email threading for better notification management. Included syntax highlighting for code snippets within comments and a commenting toolbar for issue and changeset linking.
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