How to toggle between full and incremental diff in a pull request

Question

In what seems to be a change caused by a recent update, I've noticed that sometimes pull requests I'm an approver on will silently switch to only showing the diff between the original PR commits and the earlier PR commits instead of the full diff between the PR branch and the destination branch. This typically happens when:

* Someone files a pull request putting me as an reviewer
* I add some comments/tasks and then mark as approved
* The person adds new code to the PR (perhaps addressing the comments from myself or other reviewers)
* I revisit the PR, and now I can only see the incremental changes

This is quite frustrating, since I almost always want to view the full diff. I want to know:

* How do I toggle back to seeing the full diff?
* Is it possible to disable the behavior which silently switches the PR to the "incremental diff" mode?

Stefan_y8pd1s · Accepted Answer

Hi Michael,

In Bitbucket Server 4.11, a new feature was added called iterative review. You can find out more about it in this blog post, the release notes, or the related JIRA ticket.

As a reviewer, iterative review allows you to easily see all of the changes since you last reviewed a pull request. As you've noticed, the diff view in a pull request now defaults to showing your unreviewed changes if they exist. Any changes an author pushes after you mark the pull request as "Needs Work" or "Approved" are considered unreviewed.

However, if you would prefer to see all changes in the pull request (the "effective diff", or what you've referred to as the "full diff"), you can select this option from the commit selector, which is above the file tree in the pull request diff view. Opening the commit selector will allow you to select between all changes in the pull request, your unreviewed changes (if they exist), or even the changes that a particular commit introduces.

IterativeReview.png

There is currently no way to disable showing the diff of unreviewed changes by default if unreviewed changes exist.

Kind regards,
Stefan Petrucev
Atlassian Bitbucket