paulmignard

We use fogbugz at work and so far, gotta say I’m pretty impressed. It’s easy to get stuff into it, it’s easy to find things, and most importantly, it has a pretty slick API that you can hop around in pretty quickly. This can be good and bad because it usually has me answering things like “Arg, fogbugz doesn’t do x when I y!” with a hearty “Ah, but with the API, almost anything is possible!” Yay I’m a superhero!

Having said all of that I have learned that just because a company advertises having api doesn’t mean that it’s any good OR that it even does what they say it will. Now, whenever I encounter a blob of software advertising an API one of the first things I do is bang out a little AIR app to test it. Why AIR? Well, I’m most proficient in actionscript but more importantly I can crank out a little app that is easy to share in our Windows and MAC environment. Plus, whenever the question comes up on whether an API can accomplish this or that I can actually test it and kinda stage what all would go into completing the task.

So, while this isn’t the most exciting AIR app out there, I’m throwing it out to anybody else is in need of testing the fogbugz API while not wanting to spend the hour to get something like this running.

Download here – source code is included, cool kiwi icon is not

Instructions: You’ll want to peruse the api page but it’s pretty straight forward, log in with your fogbugz url, username (email address), and password. After that, to access the API you’ll need to fill out an action (again, specified on the api page) and a set of variables.

To start out easy – just type “listProjects” (without the quotes) in the action field and hit go – viola! From there you can feel around the api page and really get a feel for all of the stuff you can do.

What you get back is some xml (you can view it in a pretty tree or as an unsightly raw mess of xml) – what you do with it from there is up to you. I encourage you to do good but to each his own. If you have any problems just leave a comment and I can help you out.

Remember, you do need the latest version of Adobe AIR – you can grab it here.

UPDATE:

4/10/09: Well, a buddy of mine was the first user and right away found my first error – I wasn’t throwing an error is the email or password was wrong. Fixed, uploaded new version!

6/19/09: I made it so that it will remember your fogbugz url and username and I added a link to the bottom right corner to shamelessly promote myself.