Assets for Jira Service Management cloud will have a limit of 2 unique constraints per object type

[#1]

Hello Atlassian Community,

We have an important update to share regarding the ability to enforce unique attribute values on objects within Assets for Jira Service Management cloud.

At present an object type in Assets for Jira Service Management can have an unbounded number of unique constraints applied to its attributes. After 31st of October 2024 we will be introducing:

• A limit of 2 unique constraints per object type.
• Removing support for unique constraints on attributes with cardinality > 1
• Removing support for unique constraints on Text Area attributes

This is part of our effort to offer a more scalable, performant and reliable experience as we make major enhancements to the underlying platform that powers Assets. We believe these new limits will be sufficient for the vast majority of use cases in which Assets is utilised.

For customers with any existing object types that breach these limits, we are asking these customers to please modify them before 31st of October 2024. Not doing this will delay our ability to migrate you to the new Assets platform.

Effected public Assets REST API endpoints are:

• POST /objecttypeattribute/{objectTypeId}

• PUT /objecttypeattribute/{objectTypeId}

Both of these endpoints will begin to return a HTTP status code of 400 if there is an attempt to add a unique attribute constraint (via the uniqueAttribute property) and the limit has been reached or the attribute type is not supported.

If you have more than 2 attributes on an object type that you need to ensure are unique, a potential workaround is creating an automation rule to check the number of objects that can contain a particular value after an object is updated. You could then raise a Jira issue to resolve the duplicate or notify the relevant schema administrator.

By making these changes we can ensure your site can begin to utilise our improved Assets platform when it is completed and reap the vastly improved the scalability, performance and reliability it will offer. We’ll be announcing more about this soon.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out and give us your feedback. We will be listening carefully to help us understand how we should evolve the unique constraint feature and our limits in future.

All the best

Justin King
Senior Product Manager, Jira Service Management

[Dave Mathijs]

I'm only seeing limits, guardrails and restrictions in Assets these days. Don't know how exactly this improves scalability... 🙁

[Kevin Thibeault]

I agree with Dave about seeing a lot more limits, guardrails, and restrictions lately. I'm guessing they are doing this to make the migration to the new Assets platform more efficient.

The question is, will these restrictions remain after the new Assets platform is live? 

[Justin King]

Hi Dave and Kevin,

I understand it might seem that way. The reason is we are heavily re-working the underlying platform that drives Assets. It will allow us to offer greater reliability, much larger scale and better performance. However the shift to a different architecture means that a small subset of features need to be modified to ensure we can still offer them in a reliable and scalable way. 

Don't worry, we have big plans for Assets that extend beyond introducing limits and restrictions!