Why are there so many different scripting/query languages in use?

Question

As a new JSM admin I find it absolutely maddening that the scripting environment is so fragmented and there's no real indication of what should be used when, or the fact that some things just don't work together, but there's no documentation that I can find to support that, just silent failures during automation runs.

Why does JQL behave differently than AQL? Why are there even two different languages in the first place instead of just standardizing on JavaScript to be actually useful?

Why is there a difference between .jiraDateTime() and jqlDateTime(), and why do neither of those options format automatically to set a date/time field in an Asset object? Why do I specifically have to set {{now.format("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ")}} for it to update the date/time field on an Asset?

As far as I can tell, none of this is really documented well, or at all in some cases, and the documentation is devoid of actually useable instructions in many cases, and it seems like most posts on the Community are just app developers trying to sell their apps in the Marketplace.

Tim Pettersen · Answer

Thanks for the additional detail @Marcel Hager

I can't reproduce the issue as described (the template appears to have the ID generated correctly when I try it using Forge CLI v11.3.1). If you do come back to this and have a similar issue, would you mind raising an issue at go.atlassian.com/ECOHELP and share the generated manifest.yml file so we can investigate further?

Otherwise you may be interested in checking out Customizing Jira Service Management with Forge | Atlassian Developer Training as an alternative way to ramp up on Forge. I find sometimes that a video walk through showing the tools in action can be an easier way to ramp up on Forge development than the wall-of-text tutorials.

But in any event, JQL & AQL will be super valuable tools to thoroughly learn for using Jira. JQL in particular underpins a lot of other functionality in Jira, and is a useful utility for building Forge apps as well. So definitely a good idea to learn those thoroughly first :)

cheers,

Tim

Marcel Hager · Answer

Hi @Tim Pettersen ,

On this page Build a Jira Service Management hello world app, everything worked as expected until the section "Change the page title". Once there anything I do just throws errors, and in the manifest.yml there is no section for app id and adding it manually throws other errors.

At this time, I'm just going to move on to something else and spend more time trying to better understand JQL and AQL instead of trying to learn Forge as well.

Tim Pettersen · Answer

Hi @Marcel Hager

Sorry to hear you had a hard time getting Forge set up — could you share a bit more about where you got stuck in the dev onboarding process so we can take a look at improving the docs?

cheers,

Tim