Add a New Category to FogBugz

This article is meant for Licensed FogBugz. Sorry, but if you are using FogBugz On Demand, custom categories are currently unavailable.

While the four standard categories in FogBugz (Bug, Feature, Inquiry, Schedule Item) cover most situations, customers occasionally want to be able to add a custom category of their own, such as Task. Adding a new category to FogBugz involves adding new values to the database and source code of FogBugz, as described below. Thanks to Brian Watson, whose discussion board post is the basis for this article, and includes SQL Server-specific queries.

Warning: Editing the database directly can cause problems with your FogBugz installation. Please back up your database before editing it.

  1. Add a row into the Category table of the FogBugz database, and choose an existing ixStatusDefault for the default resolved status for this category (you can update this to a category-specific status in the next step). Set flsScheduleItem to 0.
  2. If you want to have category-specific statuses, then add new rows in the Status table with the following values, as described in this KnowledgeBase article. If you want to make one of these new statuses the default for your new category, update ixStatusDefault in the Category table accordingly.
  3. Create a new icon for this category. The easiest thing to do is to copy/edit the bug.gif icon found in the FogBugz/Website/images folder, and create a new icon called task.gif.
  4. Edit FogBugz/Website/icons.asp and add a new entry to the Select Case (ixCategory) statement in the CategoryIcon subroutine that sets sImg = "task.gif". The easiest thing to do is to hard-code the text value of the new category (sAlt = "Task") for the alt-text of the icon.
  5. You must now force FogBugz to reload its local browser cache. You can do this by logging into FogBugz as an administrator, going to Settings->Clients, clicking on any client, and clicking OK without editing anything.
  6. To confirm the change, create a test case, and confirm that your new category is an option in the Category dropdown.