Preface
This book is your one-stop resource for mastering JIRA extension and customization. You will learn how to create your own JIRA plugins, customize the look-and-feel of your JIRA UI, work with workflows, issues, custom fields, and much more.
The book starts with recipes on simplifying the plugin development process followed by a complete chapter dedicated to the plugin framework to master plugins in JIRA.
Then we will move on to writing custom field plugins to create new field types or custom searchers. We then learn how to program and customize workflows to transform JIRA into a user-friendly system.
We will then look at customizing the various searching aspects of JIRA such as JQL, searching in plugins, managing filters, and so on.
Then the book steers towards programming issues; that is, creating/editing/deleting issues, creating new issue operations, managing the other various operations available on issues using the JIRA APIs, and so on.
In the latter half of the book, you will learn how to customize JIRA by adding new tabs, menus, and web items, communicate with JIRA using the REST, SOAP, or XML/RPC interfaces, and work with the JIRA database.
The book ends with a chapter on useful and general JIRA recipes.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Plugin Development Process, covers the fundamentals of JIRA plugin development process. It covers, in detail, the setting up of a development environment, creating a plugin, deploying it, and testing it.
Chapter 2, Understanding Plugin Framework, covers, in detail, the JIRA architecture and looks at the various plugin points. It also looks at how to build JIRA from source and extend or override the existing JIRA functionalities.
Chapter 3, Working with Custom Fields, looks at programmatically creating custom fields in JIRA, writing custom field searchers, and various other useful recipes related to custom fields.
Chapter 4, Programming Workflows, looks at the various ways of programming the JIRA workflows. It includes writing new conditions, validators, post functions, and so on, and contains related recipes that are useful in extending the workflows.
Chapter 5, Gadgets and Reporting in JIRA, covers the reporting capabilities of JIRA. It looks at writing reports, dashboard gadgets, among others in detail.
Chapter 6, The Power of JIRA Searching, covers the searching capabilities of JIRA and how it can be extended using the JIRA APIs.
Chapter 7, Programming Issues, looks at the various APIs and methods used for managing issues programmatically. It covers the CRUD operations, working with attachments, programming change logs and issue links, time tracking, among others.
Chapter 8, Customizing the UI, looks at the various ways of extending and modifying the JIRA user interface.
Chapter 9, Remote Access to JIRA, looks at the remote capabilities of JIRA – REST, SOAP, and XML/RPC, and the ways of extending them.
Chapter 10, Dealing with the Database, looks at the database architecture of JIRA and covers the major tables in detail. It also covers the different ways to extend the storage and access or modify the data from plugins.
Chapter 11, Useful Recipes, covers a selected list of useful recipes which do not belong in the preceding categories, but are powerful enough to get your attention! Read away!!
What you need for this book
This book focuses on JIRA development. You will need the following software as a bare minimum:
JIRA 4.x+
JAVA 1.6+
Maven 2.x
Atlassian Plugin SDK
An IDE of your choice. The examples in the book use Eclipse and SQL Developer.
Some of the recipes are too simple to use the fully-fledged plugin development process, and you will see this highlighted as you read through the book!
Who this book is for
If you are a JIRA developer or project manager who wants to fully exploit the exciting capabilities of JIRA, then this is the perfect book for you.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "The fields oldvalue and newvalue are populated using the method getChangelogValue."
A block of code is set as follows:
<!-- entity to represent a single change to an issue. Always part of a change group -->
<entity entity-name="ChangeItem" table-name="changeitem" package-
name="">
<field name="id" type="numeric"/>
<field name="group" col-name="groupid" type="numeric"/>
<!—relations and indexes -->
</entity>When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<!-- entity to represent a single change to an issue. Always part of a change group -->
<entity entity-name="ChangeItem" table-name="changeitem" package-
name="">
<field name="oldvalue" type="extremely-long"/>
<!-- a string representation of the new value (i.e.
"Documentation" instead of "4" for a component which might be
deleted) -->
<!—relations and indexes -->
</entity>Any command line input or output is written as follows:
maven war:webapp
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "You must have noticed the new View Issue page."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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