Contributing

We would absolutely love to get the community involved, and we welcome any form of contributions – comments and questions on different communication channels, issues and pull request and anything that you build and share using our components.

Communication channels

Communication is primarily done using issues.
If you need support as soon as possible and you can't wait for any pull request, feel free to use our support.
As a last resort measure or on otherwise important matter you may also contact us directly.

Ways to help

Report bugs
Create an issue or send a pull request
Send pull requests
If you want to contribute code, check out the development instructions below.
- However when contributing larger new features, please first discuss the change you wish to make via issue with the owners of this repository before making it.
  Otherwise your work might be rejected and your effort was pointless.

We also encourage you to read the contribution instructions by GitHub.

Developing

Software Requirements

You should have the following things installed:

Git
Java 21 - should be as unmodified as possible (Recommended: Eclipse Adoptium)
Maven (Note that the Maven Wrapper is shipped with the repo)

Recommended setup

Install IntelliJ (Community Edition is sufficient)
- Install the following plugins:
  - Save Actions - Provides save actions, like running the formatter or adding final to fields
  - SonarLint - CodeStyle/CodeAnalysis
    - You may consider disabling telemetry in the settings under Tools > Sonarlint -> About
  - Checkstyle-IDEA - CodeStyle/CodeAnalysis
- Import the project
- Ensure that everything is encoded in UTF-8
- Ensure that the JDK/Java-Version is correct
- To enable AUTOMATIC reloading/restarting while developing and running the app do this (further information in " SpringBoot-Devtools" section below; Source):
  - Settings > Build, Execution, Deployment > Compiler:
    Enable Build project automatically
  - Settings > Advanced Settings:
    Enable Allow auto-make to start even if developed application is currently running
- To launch the Demo execute the predefined (launch) configuration Run Demo

SpringBoot-Developer-Tools

... should automatically be enabled.
If you are changing a file and build the project, parts of the app get restarted.
Bigger changes may require a complete restart.

Vaadin automatically reloads the UI on each restart.
You can control this behavior with the vaadin.devmode.liveReload.enabled property (default: true).

Releasing

Before releasing:

Consider doing a test-deployment before actually releasing.
Check the changelog

If the develop is ready for release, create a pull request to the master-Branch and merge the changes

When the release is finished do the following:

Merge the auto-generated PR (with the incremented version number) back into the develop
Ensure that Vaadin Directory syncs the update and maybe update the component / version there

Release failures

There are 2 modes of release failure:

The remote server was e.g. down and non of the artifacts got published
There was a build failure during release and only parts of the artifacts got released

In case 1 we can re-release the existing version,
in case 2 we have to release a new version when we can't get the artifacts deleted (as is the case with Maven Central)

How-to: Re-Releasing an existing version

Delete the release on GitHub
Delete the release Git tag from the repo (locally and remote!)
Delete the master-Branch and re-create it from the develop branch (or reset it to the state before the release-workflow commits have been done)
- This requires temporarily removing the branch protection
- Once this was done a new release is triggered immediately!

How-to: Releasing a new version

Merge the master branch back into develop (or another temporary branch)
Make sure all master branch versions are prepared for a new release
e.g. if the broken release was 1.0.0 the version should now be at 1.0.1-SNAPSHOT - the SNAPSHOT is important for the workflow!
Mark the broken release as broken e.g. inside the Changelog, GitHub Release page, etc.
You can use something like this:
```
> [!WARNING]
> This release is broken as my cat accidentally clicked the abort button during the process
```
Merge the changes back into the master branch to trigger a new release

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