Extending JIRA Actions

There are so many user stories for this one! How do you override some of the JIRA built in actions? How do you do some additional stuff in the JIRA built in action? Like doing some crazy things immediately after creation before the page return to the user? Or doing some innovative validations on some of those actions? Or do what is asked in this thread ?

Here is the simple answer to all those questions. Extends the JIRA actions using the webwork plugin module. There could be some alternatives in few cases (like handling it in a listener) but not always.

Webwork plugin module is designed to add more actions on to JIRA as well as to extend or override the existing actions. So how does all this work?

Let us quickly have a look at the actions.xml under WEB-INF/classes in your JIRA installation directory. This is where all of the JIRA's actions are defined. Here is the snippet that defines the CreateIssue action.

<action name="issue.CreateIssueDetails" alias="CreateIssueDetails">
        <view name="error">/secure/views/createissue-details.jsp</view>
        <view name="input">/secure/views/createissue-details.jsp</view>
</action>

Note: JIRA has both CreateIssue and CreateIssueDetails action. It is the latter which actually creates the Issue. The former is to select the the project and issutype and to proceeed to the issue creation form.

So we have the CreateIssueDetails action which uses the CreateIssueDetails class and the associated jsps. What we will do here is just override this action with our custom action class. We will provide an additional validation and also print some statements after the issue creation. Printing statements is ofcourse not a helpful exmaple but that is just a placeholder where you can do whatever you want to!

Here is how the atlassian-plugin.xml looks like when we override the JIRA action.

<webwork1 key="jtricks-create-issue-details" name="JTricks Create Issue Details" >
    <actions>
        <action name="com.jtricks.MyCreateIssueDetails" alias="CreateIssueDetails">
        <view name="error">/secure/views/createissue-details.jsp</view>
        <view name="input">/secure/views/createissue-details.jsp</view>
    </action>
    </actions>
</webwork1>

As usual you need a unique key here. Note that we haven't changed the jsps. But if you want to, you can do that as well! It comes with the extra cost of re-building the war file with the jsp in the edit-webapp (for production instances) and maintaing the version for future upgrades.

Coming back to our example, I have given a custom action class here com.jtricks.MyCreateIssueDetails. As I am not giving a full action class implementation here, I would start with extending the action.

public class MyCreateIssueDetails extends CreateIssueDetails{

It will ask you to add the constructor and so on. Now we override the methods you want. Let us see an example for validation:

@Override
protected void doValidation() {
    //My custom validation here
    String assignee = getSingleValueFromParameters("assignee");
    if (assignee == null || !assignee.equals(getRemoteUser().getName())){
        addErrorMessage("Assignee is not the current user, got U!");
    }
    super.doValidation();
}

Here we add an error to the error collection if the assignee is not the current user. Just for the sake of an example! Now let us look at how to do the post creation steps.

@Override
protected String doExecute() throws Exception {
    String ret_val  = super.doExecute();
    if (!ret_val.equals(Action.ERROR)){
        postCreationTasks();
    }
    return ret_val;
}

All I am doing is to call the actual Create issue Details's doExecute method and do additional stuff if the retunr value is not error. In the postCreationTasks method, do you stuff like printing something as I do in the example code attached below.

Hopefully that gives an overview of overriding actions in JIRA. The full source for the example can be downloaded below. Feel free to add any suggestions or feedbacks. Have a blast!

extend-action-plugin.zip
File Size:	3 kb
File Type:	zip

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