Disable History Entry for CustomFields

[Thomas Opiolka - codefortynine]

Question:

Is there a way to suppress a history entry / event when doing an issue update over the rest api while changing only addon-created custom fields?

One of our apps has some aggregation fields that change on nearly every issue update event. This spams a lot of entries into the history tab of an issue and notifications to the jira mobile app. 

Any help or hint is appreciated.

Thomas

[Andy Heinzer · Accepted solution]

Hi Thomas,

I don't know of a way to suppress the changes to the history of an issue, but you could make changes to a Jira issue in Cloud without those changes firing off a notification event if you use the REST API AND you are an admin.  Check out the details in PUT /rest/api/3/issue/{issueIdOrKey}.

QUERY PARAMETERS

notifyUsers

boolean

Indicates whether a notification email about the issue update is sent to all watchers. To disable the notification, administer Jira or administer project permissions are required. If the user doesn't have the necessary permission the request is ignored.

Default: true

So it is possible you could change a field on an issue without it notifying everyone that would normally get notified.  The thing is here is that you need to make sure that the user account making this change is a Jira admin or a project admin in order to be able to use this parameter in the REST API PUT call.

I hope this helps.

Andy

[Thomas Opiolka - codefortynine]

Hi Andy,

thank you for your answer. I am aware of the "notifyUsers" variable in the API, but this doesn't fix it. This just suppresses the emails.

In the Jira App for example this value seems to be ignored. People get notified for every change on an issue, no matter what kind of change it is.

Also the activity history gets easily filled up, and in the new issue view there is a lot more emphasis on the history.

Any other idea?

Thomas

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi Thomas,

Sorry I misunderstood your intention here.  I did some additional searching on this question and from what I have found, it does not yet appear to be possible to do this in Jira Cloud.  Please see the Developer Community post https://community.developer.atlassian.com/t/is-there-a-way-to-update-an-issue-with-rest-call-and-do-not-generate-an-entry-in-issue-history/26283

From that post kkercz posted this:

There is currently no way not to generate a history entry when updating an issue.

Perhaps you could develop an alternative implementation of your functionality, based on issue properties? Issue properties updates won’t be visible in the history.

Granted that post is 5 years old now, however more recent posts asking the same question still have not found a way to do this it seems.  https://community.developer.atlassian.com/t/prevent-customfield-from-adding-entry-to-history/12070

Perhaps the suggestion of using an entity property instead of a custom field might be a viable alternative here? 

[Thomas Opiolka - codefortynine]

HI Andy,

thanks for your feedback and your research.

Entity Properties are no solution in my case. But at least I now know, that I didn't overlook something on this matter.

I will mark your answer as solution, because it seems to be the answer to the question.