This page is intended to give you a basic understanding of eTraxis idea and terminology. Further in 'Administration' section you will find details about administration of eTraxis.

Records

One of the main features of eTraxis is a complete customization of the items you track. You can set up any workflow with any rules, and actually you can track anything besides bugs in software. It can be your tasks, or your stamps collection, or stuff you borrow from your friends (or give them) − just anything that can be described as a state machine. This makes eTraxis not just another "bug tracking tool", and since an item to track can be not a bug but any object of the real world, I use term record in eTraxis. So, a record is a single item eTraxis tracks, and records are main objects you will work with in eTraxis.

Users

There are two kinds of users in eTraxis − regular users and administrators. Regular users work with records − create them, modify, track, etc. Administrators configure the system − they are responsible for initial customization.

Templates

To be able to work with records, you need a preliminary created template, which must be set in eTraxis by its administrators. A template just describes the life cycle of your state machine − set of states, possible transitions, permissions for users, etc. You can have and use as many templates as you would like, and each template describes a separated state machine.

Projects

To avoid big mess of templates, they are sorted into projects. Each template belongs to exactly one project − it can't belong to several projects, or to no project at all. On the other side, a project can contain any number of templates. So, each time you create a record, you have to choose a project among all projects available to you, and then one of templates existing in selected project.

Groups

eTraxis has extensive permissions management. There are three bunches of permissions:

permissions to operations on a record
permissions to transitions of a record from one particular state to another
permissions to data fields of a record

While projects lasts, a lot of people can join in or quit out. To avoid a lot of actions, needed to give required permissions to new person or to revoke from quiting one, all permissions are managed among groups only. Your administrator grants permissions to required groups just once, during your templates customization, and all that you will need later is just manage list of members of your groups. No permission can be granted or revoked for one particular person only.

There are two kinds of groups in eTraxis − local and global. Local groups exist only inside the project they belong to. Global groups are system-wide and accessible in any project registered in eTraxis.

Roles

Besides groups, there are also three system roles in eTraxis − registered, author, and responsible − which can be used to manage permissions too.

Registered is any person, who successfully logged in eTraxis. This role is useful when you need to grant some permissions outside your project, e.g. to create new records in your project by any authenticated user.

Author is a person, created a record.

Responsible is a person, which is current assignee of a record. Please read 'Responsibles' chapter for details.

States

As you know, a workflow is a set of states with possible transitions between them. eTraxis has two types of states − intermediate and final. Intermediate state can have transitions from itself to some another state; final state can't. Also, a record is called opened while its current state is intermediate. When state of a record is changed to final one, the record becomes closed. You can change state of a record only while the record is opened. By the way, all closed records are displayed in grey in the list of records.

Exactly one of intermediate states must be marked as initial. This is a first state of newly created records. You will not be able to use a template, if it doesn't have initial state.

Last update: 2009-07-30