Categories: Tutorials

Publishing the generated code diff to Review Board

2 min read

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

You have authored some code changes and prepared a code diff. Now you want to publish it to Review Board so as to share it with the team for review. Let us create and publish a code review request with the code diff that we generated.

When you log in to your Review Board site, you see different tabs at the top navigation bar. New Review Request is one of them. Clicking on this tab will lead you to the following screen:

You have to provide the following details in the case of an SVN repository:

Repository: This dropdown lets you choose the repository on which you are working. It lists all of the repositories added by the admin.
Base Directory: This shows the absolute path of the directory for which you have generated the SVN diff.
Diff: The process of uploading the code diff varies from VCS to VCS; that is, the fields required for creating the new review request will change as per the selected repository (if the repositories are of a different type of VCS). Let’s see what the screen for creating a review request looks like for Git:

In the case of Git, the diff option remains the same; you don’t have to provide a base directory in this case(unlike SVN). There is an additional field named Parent Diff that is a common field for distributed version control systems such as Git or Mercurial.

As a standard practice, you should make sure that all of the branches in your Git repository are made available in the Review Board server. If that is not the case, you will not be able to post the code diff for a branch that is not available directly because Review Board will not be able to show the code diff. In this case, you have to use the Parent Diff feature of Review Board.