Bitbucket Cloud is removing “Merged pull requests“ tab from Branch Compare view

[#1]

Hi everybody,

We wanted to share an update with our customer community about changes coming to Bitbucket Cloud UI shortly.

Starting on May 20, 2024 , we are removing  Merged pull requests tab from the Branch compare view. Displaying list of commits and the diff between two branches from the same view will remain unchanged.

We had to make this difficult decision for technical reasons. As our product continues to grow, we always look for opportunities to improve product’s architecture to enhance performance. Sometimes this means trade-offs with changes to the product interface.

Users whose workflows may be impacted by this change can use two alternatives available within Bitbucket Cloud UI:

1. If Deployments are configured on the repository: The Deployment card contains separate tab Merged pull requests that can be used to see the list of merged pull requests associated with the branch that is being deployed.

2. The Commit view page has functionality that allows the user to preview all pull requests associated with a given commit. Using this functionality together with the list of commits from the Branch Compare page, a full list of pull requests associated with all commits between two branches can be constructed.

If neither of these two options is viable users can upvote this public feature request to get this functionality re-implemented in the product.

[Bill Wesel]

3 days after I enter a ticket that this functionality was abruptly removed from my account this article is published, giving only a week and a half notice that it is going away with no viable alternatives (sorry, what you propose as a workaround does not offer comparable functionality). 

This type of behavior from Atlassian (in a competitive SCM space) is frustrating and disappointing.  

[Katarína Lukácsy]

@Bill Wesel your experience is definitely not the kind of experience we want our customers to go through. We have updated our internal process to avoid such a thing from happening again. While we have to sometimes make tough decisions about the functionality our product offers, the communication around such decisions needs to meet a high bar. We continue to strive to reach and maintain that bar.

[James O'Cull]

Hi, my team was previously using this behavior to prepare concise change lists between two tagged versions. Are there really no other workarounds or even some reporting behavior that can be used?

[Allan Jones]

Pulling a feature in active use with no way to replicate the behaviour is a terrible user experience. As with James' comment above, we were using this list to understand what PRs were merged. This isn't something that can be done from a list of commits as the PR is nothing to do with the repo, but is a construct that sits on top outside the repo itself so it has to be done by Atlassian in some way.

[Suhas Sundararaju]

Hi All,

I want to discuss a potential solution (automation script) based on workaround 2 mentioned in this blog.

The List commits API with the include and exclude parameters, retrieves the commits that are reachable from the source branch but not reachable from the destination branch.

Example:

https://api.bitbucket.org/2.0/repositories/{workspaceID}/{reposlug}/commits/?include=branch-A&exclude=branch-B


Using include=branch-A and exclude=branch-B in the Bitbucket API call retrieves the commits that are reachable from the branch-A branch but not reachable from the branch-B branch.

The include and exclude parameters in the Bitbucket API are typically used for specifying commit ranges. They do not directly replicate the behavior of git diff A...B. However, you can use them to retrieve commits between two points in the commit history, similar to what git log COMMIT_A..COMMIT_B does.

Once the commits are fetched, we can iterate through each commit and list pull requests containing that commit using Commit Pull Requests API

In summary, we list all the pull requests that are already part of the source branch using these APIs, allowing us to filter merged pull requests accordingly. There is a sample Python script in the knowledge article that automates fetching all diff commits from a branch compare and listing pull requests associated with each diff commit, exporting the data to a CSV file "report.csv".

Sample CSV Output:

Commits	Pull Request	Title	State	Author	Updated On
26f6bff57d3b2d04cee46ab7ebcf0ee1dae4d00d	110	ABC TEST1	MERGED	Suhas	2024-06-06T13:20:22.788867+00:00
ee1dae57d3b204cee46ab7ebcf0e0ee1dae4d00	111	ABC TEST2	OPEN	Suhas	2024-06-06T13:20:22.788867+00:00
5711992332b3741189bb66bd36d3332b374118	112	ABC TEST3	MERGED	Suhas	2024-06-06T13:20:22.788867+00:00

[Tobi Bello]

Thanks for the workaround @Suhas Sundararaju but why should we have to jump through multiple hoops to do something that could easily be done before. 

Did no one survey users before implementing this change?