Creating new issues in JIRA using email from a web applications

Question

This is a multi part question...

Situation: We are in the process of creating a web-based application for the government.  We intend to create a button within the appliation for users to report bugs, improvements, or other issues.  When the button is selected, we want a standard form to show up where they enter text in certain fieds, but other fields are already filled in for them.  We are not giving the application users direct access to JIRA, hence the text fields.  Also, I want to make sure that all fields are completed before they are allowed to submit. When the issue shows up in JIRA, we intend to manually reclassify the issue as another type (bug, improvement, new feature, etc.).

Questions:

1. What plugin would be best for the above situation?  I was looking at Create JIRA from Thunderbird (but not all users have FireFox, most are on IE7) or EZGooey Mail Handler.  Am I on the right track?

2. How do I incorporate the "email issues" into the current workflow?  I want it to be a separate process, but to evenutally be incoporated into the current process.

3. How do we set up the form with the fields we want them to fill out and the fields we want to be static?

4. Do we have to set up a new user account so when the application users submit an issue, they will all be reported by the same "user" so to speak?

5. Will there be certain steps within our UI, server, or other that will need to be taken before the application user will be able to submit an issue?

Thank you.

Jim Birch · Answer

1.  You can create issues via email from using the POP3 service Create or Comment handler.   This has limited fields available (basically reporter, title and description) so you need to think fairly carefully about how you want this to work.  You need either a pop3 account for each project, or a triage project that receives issues and they are then then edited and placed in the appropriate project.

2.  Use one of the advanced mail handler plugins that allow you to specify more fields.  You still have to do all your data validation on the page.

Alternately:

3.  Allow users access to Jira to create issues but cut down other features eg issue browsing.  It's possible to set up Jira in many ways, eg browse own issues only, and so on.

4.  Use the SOAP interface to create issues and cut all the email crap.  You get lots more control of what happens.

Radu Dumitriu · Answer

Here's the doc:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Creating+a+SOAP+Client

Radu Dumitriu · Answer

Since you are in a web application, shouldn't you integrate JIRA by doing a Web Service call ? I mean, you create a page, have full control over the fields, then call a simple RPC on JIRA. That would fix 1, 2, 3, eventually 4 and surely the 5th point.

Where's the mail coming in ? Don't understand, it's not clear for me.