Mantis - Advanced Features
While reporting an issue, along with some general information, there are advanced features supported by Mantis to make it more informational and useful. In this chapter, we will discuss about those advanced features.
@Mention - Notification
Mantis supports @mentions to gather user attentions and send notifications about an issue or note, even if they are not on the notified list.
It is a simple way to draw someone's attention. Simply reference a college in an issue note or description, and the note details with a link to the issue details will be emailed.
To mention a user in Description/Note section, first write @ and along with it write the name of user as shown in the following screenshot.
@mentions is hyperlinked to the user page and highlighted when notes/issues are formatted.
In this case, users receive both regular email notification as well as @mention notification. However, @mention notifications have a simplified format as well as a different subject.
The following screenshot displays the received email for @mention.
Send Reminder
Send Reminder is the alternate functionality of @mention. This feature is used to call the attention of a particular user. For example, the Product Owner sends a reminder to the team to update comments.
Mantis generally recommends to use @mention. However, it is an optional feature.
Go to the View Issue and click the Issue ID to open the View page.
At the top of the issue, the “Send a Reminder” button is displayed as shown in the following screenshot.
After clicking the Send a reminder button, a message box appears. On the left side, there is a list of users and on the right side messages can be typed. After selecting the user and writing the message, click the Send button at the bottom of the page.
The following screenshot shows how to send a reminder.
In the View Issue → Activities section, the Reminder information can be seen as shown in the following screenshot.
Text Formatting
As of now, Mantis supports the following HTML tags that can be used to format the tag in the description and notes field − p, li, ul, ol, br, pre, I, b, u, em, strong. However, Mantis doesn’t encourage formatting the text.
The text emails will have raw tags rather than formatted text. Mantis has a plan to move towards Markdown for formatting, which will deprecate HTML tags.
In addition to Markdown support, Mantis is planning to support html emails. These features together will address the limitations of the existing solution. However, as of now, there is no specific timeline for Markdown or for HTML emails support.
Attach Files
Mantis supports attaching multiple files to an issue. A user can attach the file while reporting the issue by clicking the Choose File button. The file can also be attached from the View Issue by clicking the Upload File button. Alternative method, is to attach the file in Edit Issue mode.
The following screenshot displays how to attach a file in the View Issue module.
Click the above marked button and browse the file to upload. Files will be displayed below the button on successful upload.
Then, click Add Notes. The file will be get added in the Activities section as shown in the following screenshot.
