Changing the reporter to a non-human subject via an API or other

[Adam Kecskes]

There are Jira apps out there that once installed can change the Reporter field to, in the example I have in mind, the name of the app itself, or some other name — a name that is not an existing users, nor gets added to the list of users. A bot.

We're in a position where we're syncing GitHub issues to our Jira projects, but we're forced into using an existing user. That's not useful in the long run; we'd like to be able to switch the reporter so that it says something like "Octocat" to represent that the issue was brought in from GitHub.

I know we can't populate the reporter with just an arbitrary name of a GitHub user (nor do I think we'd want to; we're tracking that info within the Description itself).

What options do I have to make this happen? We're a software company so we can create an app for ourselves, but before I dive into that rabbit hole, is there a more straightforward way to do this? A call that can be made at the time of creation? A script or automation? 

[Adam Kecskes]

And forgive me if this in the wrong place; we're on Jira Cloud; not sure how this got to be part of Jira Core Server.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No problem, a lot of us pick the wrong options for labels and groups when posting (when I say "a lot", I really do mean "most", and I've done it myself, despite <mumble> years of experience and complaining about it).

The Community team is looking at it, but it's way down on the list at the moment, as there's a huge upgrade to a new version coming in May (so we'll be waiting to see if that helps before we talk about it again)

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Yes, to do almost anything in Jira, it needs to know who you are.  Even when it's an automation, it still wants to track "who did this" (pretty much the point of an issue tracker!).

So, in this case, you'll need to create a "dummy" user for Github to log in as, unless you would be happier with enabling SSO so that records get updated with the actual user who made changes in Github.

[Adam Kecskes]

Thanks, Nic. I know, Jira is big on the tracking, haha!

How does one create a dummy user? The app (it's Exalate, btw, a syncing app) added a "dummy" user of sorts but it's not someone who shows up in my user list.

In the case of Exalate, after I first ran it, the reporter for the newly sync'd issues was "Exalate", like so:

SSO is too much; we don't need their information that badly, since we can return back to the link. The main goal is not to have my account attached to every sync'd issue. 😄

One part of the goal, of course, it to not pay for an extra license fee for a user isn't really a user in that respect, but rather represents a category of people who are reporting the issue. The dummy user would never be assigned an issue since that would make no sense.

At a guess, Exalate is is using the `atlassian-addons-project-access` role to do its magic, but looking through the developer docs, I'm not seeing an obvious path to even change the reporter for an app like they, much less in a more simplified way for what our needs are.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Apps often add their own dummy users, which don't count towards your user licence.

To create a dummy user, you will need to pretend that the dummy is a human - they'll need their own email address (which you can access), and you'll need to run through the same process that you did to create your own account.

[Adam Kecskes]

So it sounds like the answer is "create our own app" and figure it out from there.

I've already done some light digging into the apps, but nothing has stood out as obvious, so I'll deep dive now. Was hoping there was a more straightforward (like writing a script or calling an auth'd API in particular) way of doing it. Obviously an app can do it, so there's gotta be something in app creation that specifically allows the app to change the user.

Thanks for your time Nic. If I find something that works for us, I'll post it back here.