Handling large numbers of JIRA projects

Once you have a large number of projects in JIRA creating an issue can become a bit tedious, scrolling through the long list of projects to choose just the right one. JIRA (Enterprise edition) already provides Project Categories that you can group projects into, so without further ado, here's a JSP hack to reduce the size of that list of projects by letting you select a project category first.

Installation

The modified file for JIRA 3.13 is createissue-start.jsp and replaces the file of the same name in your JIRA instance. There should be no need to restart JIRA. The usual disclaimers apply, drink responsibly, don't drive and derive etc.

Making it easier to maintain JIRA workflows

This is one for JIRA admins.

I've had to track down a few problems recently that were related to fields not appearing on screens, especially when issues were changing their status. The cause turned out to be customized Transition Screens. A Transition Screen is the screen that is shown while you are moving from one status to another, and it's easy to forget which screen goes with each transition.

Sure, you can click on each transition and look for which screen is being used, or you can look at the list of screens and see which transitions used each screen. However, as the number of transitions and screens begins to grow, workflows become harder to maintain. The precision hack shown here helps with this. Click on the image to enlarge and look at the "Transitions" column. Each line has had the text "with the screen "added.




When you view any JIRA workflow with the "View Workflow Steps" screen, the transitions between steps (statuses) now have their screen information shown as well. At a glance, you can now look at a single workflow and see which of your transitions have those troublesome custom transition screens.

The file to change is

atlassian-jira/secure/admin/views/workflow/viewworkflowsteps.jsp

and the modified version can be found here. This was tested with JIRA 3.13.2 and is also a good example of what you can do with JSP if you have to.