Creating an new customer ticket?

[Rick Fuller]

First off I have to say, I hate Jira and I hate the fact my company think we should run our support requests through it, rather than say using Zendesk - something that doesn't require a doctorate in computing to integrate with.

Rant out of the way - how come I can easily create a new ticket for a customer by email yet when I'm trying to create a new ticket by API, it returns:

JIRA Administrators global permission is required

Does this really mean I have to risk putting  an administrators account in the API in order to create a simple support ticket? Surely that is a MASSIVE security risk?

Secondly Jira you need to fix your API documentation for creating a new request, because you don't mention ANYWHERE that you have to create a user first to raise one. Even your example JSON neglects any form of user identification! 

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi Rick,

Sorry to hear about the frustrations you must be having with trying to use the Jira Service Desk REST API here.   It is true that Jira Service Desk requires the users to have an account before they can create a request. There is some explanation of the permissions and roles that exist in Service Desk over in https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/jira/service-desk/rest/intro/#permissions which does link to some other resources on how Jira Service Desk manages accounts such as:

For detailed information on roles and permissions, see Permissions overview and Setting up service desk users.

As you have noted, there are options in the mail configuration of a Service Desk project that allow the user to easily create their own account.  This only works though if they send an email to that specific email address AND the project settings are setup to allow customers to create their own account.

If users don't create their own account via sending an email, then an admin has to invite/create that user, or another user has to invite them to that Service Desk, or they would have to sign up by visiting the Customer portal website directly (if the project allows them to signup themselves).  There is no way that a non-admin Jira user can create their own account in Jira Service Desk via the REST API. 

I suspect you are calling the endpoint of POST /rest/servicedeskapi/customer, in which case it does explain that the permission required to create users via the REST API is only available to Jira Administrators.

This method adds a customer to the Jira Service Desk instance by passing a JSON file including an email address and display name. The display name does not need to be unique. The record's identifiers, name and key, are automatically generated from the request details.

Permissions required: Jira Administrator Global permission

But once you have a customer account in Jira Service Desk, you can call POST /rest/servicedeskapi/request in order to create a request.  Sorry to hear that this has caused you frustration.  However most users of Jira Service Desk don't start their journey with the REST API, they usually are introduced to the customer portal site first, or an email signup for that portal.

I am curious to better understand exactly which resources you were referencing here.  If our documentation is lacking in the manner you suggest, I would certainly be interested to improve this to better help users like yourself.

I hope this helps.

Andy