Enumerating settable parameters - ruby

Question

I successfully setup a connection to my Rally project, but am not able to programatically set the "Submitted By" field when opening defects. I am misnaming the parameter, or it is not settable via the REST API. Any help on querying modifiable parameters, link to attribute names, or code to set the "Submitted By" parameter would be greatly appreciated.
My goal is to have a webpage where folks submit defects or stories, along with their email, and use that to populate their username in the "Submitted By" field. My current setup can open Stories and Defects but only anonymously since the second to last line has no effect.
I am using the Ruby API and the following is the ruby code that gets invoked when a user clicks on a button on the main page, which redirects them to localhost:4567/rally_defect where Sinatra is listening.
require 'rubygems'
require 'rally_rest_api'
require 'sinatra'
custom_headers = CustomHttpHeader.new
custom_headers.name = 'Mail 2 Rally'
custom_headers.version = '0.1'
custom_headers.vendor = 'Rally Software'
rally_server = 'https://rally1.rallydev.com/slm'
rally_username = <insert rally username>
rally_pwd = <insert rally password>
rally = RallyRestAPI.new(:base_url => rally_server,
:username => rally_username,
:password => rally_pwd,
:http_headers => custom_headers)
get '/rally_defect' do
rally.create(:defect, :name => "Test Defect",
:description => "This is a test",
:SubmittedBy => "test")
end

Answer 1

If you're getting started building this integration, I'd strongly recommend using rally_api instead of rally_rest_api.
rally_rest_api is in the process of being deprecated for a number of issues around performance and stability. There won't be any further development on rally_rest_api moving forward.
You can find documentation on rally_api here:
https://developer.help.rallydev.com/ruby-toolkit-rally-rest-api-json
rally_api does require Ruby 1.9.2 or higher.
rally_api's syntax is quite similar to rally_rest_api. The rally_api version of what you're attempting above would look something like the code sample below. Note that any "set-able" parameter can be set simply by including its name in the object hash and setting that to a value.
The best place to look for the Rally Webservices API object model, including Artifact attributes, allowed values, and whether they are write-able is the Webservices API documentation:
https://rally1.rallydev.com/slm/doc/webservice
When an attribute of a Rally Artifact is itself a Rally Object like a User, for example, either lookup the Object in Rally first (the example below does this), or, set the value to the REST URL reference to the object in Rally. For instance, if you know that user#company.com has ObjectID 12345678910 in Rally, then you can do:
user_ref = "/user/12345678910"
new_defect["SubmittedBy"] = user_ref
The code below shows the way to do a lookup into Rally to get the User object, given an email-formatted UserID, since I'm assuming you'll probably need to accomodate multiple different users.
require 'rubygems'
require 'rally_api'
require 'sinatra'
#Setting custom headers
headers = RallyAPI::CustomHttpHeader.new()
headers.name = 'Mail 2 Rally'
headers.vendor = "My Company"
headers.version = "0.1"
# Rally credentials
rally_username = <insert rally username>
rally_pwd = <insert rally password>
rally_server = 'https://rally1.rallydev.com/slm'
# Rally REST API config
config = {:base_url => rally_server}
config[:username] = rally_username
config[:password] = rally_pwd
config[:workspace] = "Workspace Name"
config[:project] = "Project Name"
config[:headers] = headers #from RallyAPI::CustomHttpHeader.new()
# New up rally connection config
#rally = RallyAPI::RallyRestJson.new(config)
# Lookup UserID for SubmittedBY
submitted_by_user_id = "user#company.com"
user_query = RallyAPI::RallyQuery.new()
user_query.type = :user
user_query.fetch = "ObjectID,UserName,DisplayName"
user_query.order = "UserName Asc"
user_query.query_string = "(UserName = \"#{submitted_by_user_id}\")"
# Query for user
user_query_results = #rally.find(user_query)
submitted_by_user = user_query_results.first
# Create the Defect
new_defect = {}
new_defect["Name"] = "Test Defect"
new_defect["Description"] = "This is a test"
new_defect["SubmittedBy"] = submitted_by_user
new_defect_create_result = #rally.create(:defect, new_defect)
puts "New Defect created FormattedID: #{new_defect_create_result.FormattedID}"