Dynamic due dates in a Jira issue - no add-ons

Roberta_t1e5kc

Hi all,

We are trying to set up due date dynamically upon creation of an Issue. For example, now + 30 days or 3rd Thursday of April, etc.

We don't have any specific add-on right now. Any suggestions that wouldn't require spending money would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Roberta

Andy Heinzer

Hi Roberta,

I understand you are looking for a free solution that would let you automatically set the Due date upon issue creation in Jira.  As you have found, this is not something that Jira can do out of the box natively.   There was a suggestion request for a post function in Jira to do this over in https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-39346 However this was closed as something Jira won't be planning to implement any time soon.

I found a number of other posts on community about this problem.  There are lots of plugins that can help here. The highest viewed/voted on I found was this one:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Core-questions/How-do-I-automatically-set-the-Due-Date-of-an-issue-via-a/qaq-p/441125

In it, Sam Hall suggested 3 different plugins that can do this.  However since he posted this in 2017, I know that the Suite Utilities Plugin he mentions has become a paid plugin (previous versions were free). Which leaves us without a clear free solution.

I thought perhaps this could be something done with a slick javascript.  I found a similar thread in https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Duedate-default-value-when-creating-issue/qaq-p/290479

Which Ihor provides an interesting javascript that can set the due date for today's day when created.  I played around with this and it works to set the date to today's date for that field.  However I found that it's a lot more complicated to accurate increment that javascript by exactly 30 days.  Javascript has some interesting ways of handling dates in the native functions.  Simply adding a value of 30 to the day value does not correctly increment dates. So that script is just fine for setting a date of today.  But it fails to be useful in it's current state for your use case here.  I thought I might have found a solution, but the changing of months, leap year accounting, and changing of years that is possible when incrementing by 30 days would require you to take a date convert to another date format, increment the days correctly, and then convert back.  Sadly, I have not figured out how to do this well with Javascript alone.  It might be possible to do with javascript alone, but I fear that the script will have to be rather long to correctly add exactly 30 days to the current date at the time of creation. Unfortunately, I have not found a good free solution yet for your use case. 

 

It could be possible to create a plugin that would help you do this, but that could be even more effort that hacking away at this with a javascript.  I will try to work on this some more, but I'm not sure this is something that will be feasible to do in javascript alone.