Use Github Pull Request Review API when posting multiple comments?

[ibrahima]

Now that this is available in preview, would it make sense to use the Pull Request Review API?https://developer.github.com/changes/2016-12-14-reviews-api/ This would probably make it possible to post multiple comments and have them actually appear as line comments, without sending multiple emails. Not completely sure if everything would work perfectly at this stage, but it'd be a nice feature to have in the future!

[pkaminski]

Yep, I'm looking into this. Compatibility with GHE and support for email replies are two initial concerns.

[rjbell4]

FYI, this is fully compatible with GHE now

[pkaminski]

With the latest version of GHE, yes. Not everyone is on it though.

[pkaminski]

So, I started digging into this and it's still not possible! The API doesn't allow posting threaded comments, or posting comments on more than one commit in the same batch. GitHub's UI does allow both these things so it's not impossible that the API will as well at some point, but it's been over a year since it went GA so clearly they're not in a hurry.

The lack of those two features compounded by the git-diff-only comment positioning system would make for a sufficiently terrible (and inconsistent) experience that I don't think it's worth implementing at this time.

[Pyton]

Ok, but there is API for posting batch of comments per commit:
https://developer.github.com/v3/pulls/reviews/#create-a-pull-request-review

Is this cannot be used to achieve the goal of creating comments per line per file? I believe yes.

[pkaminski]

This is precisely the API we're discussing here, and the (current) limitations listed above make it essentially unusable, yes.

[Pyton]

Is there any reason why can't implement sending multiple API requests with different commits?

About threads could you explain what you mean?

[pkaminski]

GitHub sends one notification to users per request, so using multiple requests for a single Publish is a non-starter.

As for threads, the API doesn't support "replying" to comments. All comments posted via the API will start a new thread, even if it's on the same line as a previous comment. This will completely mess up conversations if some people are actually using the GitHub UI.

The other flaw alluded to above (that is not specific to this API but relevant) is that in GitHub comments can only be posted on lines that appear in the git delta. Besides the difficulty in mapping target lines over any comments placed on lines not in range of the delta will need to be rendered as top-level comments anyway.