What is your most valuable Jira "trick"

[Ivar]

Hi all!

I have been using Jira for a year, year and a half now, and I'm constantly finding new small tricks that makes my Jira day just a little bit easier. An example - instead of "manually" changing the version on a issue on the Planning board, drag and drop the issue on the version you want it to instead on the right hand side. I found this "hidden" feature (most likely it is documented somewhere, but I've never taken the time to read the user doc very much) after 1 years of use.

So I came up with the idea to ask the question here - to get similar information from others - some small features that make your day just a little bit easier, especially with operations you do often :)

[Igor Sereda [ALM Works] · Accepted solution]

I did a trick to have several initial statuses in a workflow.

We set up our public-facing JIRA's workflow with a "New Issue" status, which means that the issue should be validated by someone at ALM Works. There's a transition "Confirm" from that status to status "Open", when the issue is confirmed to be valid.

However, when the issue is already posted by someone at ALM Works, it is obviously valid, so the status should be "Open" from the start. Sadly, JIRA's workflow engine does not support multiple initial statuses.

The trick I did was:

1. Make sure "Confirm" transition has a security check so that only members of the team can execute it;
2. Export current workflow as XML;
3. Find the "Confirm" action and add "auto" attribute to it:

   <action name="Confirm" id="311" auto="true">....</action>

4. Update workflow (or create new one) from the modified XML.

Works great! Now when our guys post an issue, it's in the "New Issue" status but then gets automatically transitioned to "Open". When someone else posts an issue, they don't have permissions to execute "Confirm" and the issue remains in the "New Issue" state.

I don't think this is documented for JIRA, but there's some documentation in the OpenSymphony project.

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

Nice trick!

[Ivar]

How is this in regards to Jira upgrades? Have there been any issues related to it or do you consider the risk of incompatability as small?

[Igor Sereda [ALM Works]]

Haven't had any problems with this during upgrades from 4.0 up to current 4.4. This functionality is part of the "osworkflow" open-source library, which is the basis for the workflows in JIRA, so I consider the risk quite small.

[MattS]

Interesting. For the docs I had to download the source package from https://java.net/downloads/osworkflow/which has the HTML docs as well

[G]

Hi,

I'm just wondering if this still works in JIRA 6.4 before I try it out. I was going to address a similar problem by using fast track transition to another status if the user creating the ticket isn't in a particular group but this looks interesting.

Cheers,

Gaj

[Igor Sereda [ALM Works]]

Hi Gaj, didn't try it on JIRA 6.4, but I believe it should work. The "OS Workflow" subsystem is still there and hasn't been changed in a while.

Igor

[pablo pra]

Hi, nice tick! thanks...

Do you know how to hide the "new status" (or any status)  from the User Interface diagram ?

(if it is posible)

regards,

Paul

[Igor Sereda [ALM Works]]

Hey Paul, I'm not sure if it is possible, but if it is, it would be a functionality of the Workflow Designer interface in the admin section.

[Dennis Kromhout van der Meer]

Definitely the Keyboard Shortcuts, a lot of people forget about them but it's probably one of the most underrated features ever. For example, try it by pressing the "." on any JIRA ticket.

[Ivar]

I've never been that into keyboard shortcuts other than the most used ones. But I'll start exploring them now; "underrated features". :)

[Andy Brook [Plugin People]]

Biased yes, still think its most valuable, oh yea. https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugins/com.dolby.atlassian.jira.jirasu

[JamieA]

Yes, useful, same function exists in script runner too ;-)

[Radu Dumitriu]

If we are praising ourselves this plugin: https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugins/com.keplerrominfo.jira.plugins.rightsdna

The beta, which is due next week, gives advices on how to fix your permissions :P, has sanity reports on users. Stay tuned!

[JamieA]

;-)

Su exit - logout then log back in again!

[Andy Brook [Plugin People]]

@Jamie, as awesome as the scriptrunner is, I think its only going to do half the SU function, unable to do the SU-exit? SU plugin value add!

[Mizan]

I had written a groovy script in behaviours plugin which was suppose to run on all screens(create issue screen ,transition screens)

i needed the project id in my script to get all versions of the project ,for this i used Object pid = getFieldById("pid") but pid is only available on issue creation screen(i realized this very late) .... but issue id is available on other screens , so

List<Version> projVersions=new ArrayList();
    
    Object pid = getFieldById("pid")
    Object id = getFieldById("id")
 

   if(pid.value!=null){
        projVersions=ComponentManager.getInstance().getVersionManager().getVersions(Long.parseLong(pid.value));
    }   
    else{
        MutableIssue missue=ComponentManager.getInstance().getIssueManager().getIssueObject(Long.parseLong(id.value))
	projectid=missue.getProjectObject().getId();
        projVersions=ComponentManager.getInstance().getVersionManager().getVersions(projectid);
        
    }

This helped at that time so its valuable for me :)