Connect Jira with Aris, and add custom field linking to process.

WG_1hoz8p

We use ARIS (ARIS Process Intelligence & Process Mining Software) as our corporate platform for modeling and maintaining business processes.

We would like to establish traceability between Jira features/user stories and the corresponding business processes defined in ARIS.

Would it be possible to add a custom field in Jira (Adding custom fields to Jira) and integrate it with ARIS?

Ideally, when a user creates or updates a feature or user story, they should be able to select one or more ARIS processes through:

• An auto-complete search field that suggests process names as the user types, or
• A dropdown/list that is automatically populated with process data from ARIS.

If this is possible, what integration options are available, and how could the synchronization between Jira and ARIS be implemented?

If someone can point me on track (documentation, references, et cetera), I would be helped.

Ajay salla

Hi @WG ,

Thanks for the detail on this — yes, it's doable, and it's actually a fairly common pattern (same idea as linking Jira to a CMDB or CRM). A couple of things worth flagging before pick an approach.

First, just adding a plain custom field per the Confluence doc won't get us autocomplete on its own. Native Jira fields (select lists etc.) only store static options inside Jira — they can't query ARIS live as someone types. To get the search-as-you-type behavior you described, we need to pair a custom field with an actual integration layer.

Good news on the ARIS side: it has a Repository REST API (available at /apidocs on the ARIS server) with a find operation that lets you search processes/models by name, so there's something for an integration to query against. Docs here if useful: https://docs.aris.com/latest/yay-repository-api-guide/en/Repository-API---Technical-Introduction.pdf

Here's how I'd rank the options:

1. Elements Connect (Atlassian Marketplace app) – this is probably our best bet. It's built specifically for connecting Jira fields to external REST APIs with live autocomplete, so we'd just point it at the ARIS find endpoint. We'd store the ARIS GUID (not just the name) as the field value so links don't break if a process gets renamed later, and it supports multi-select too.
App: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/23337/elements-connect-external-data-fields
Docs: https://doc.elements-apps.com/elements-connect/

2. A custom Forge app with our own field type – more work, but keeps this fully in-house without a marketplace license. Jira supports building custom field types that call an external API live for search.
Docs: https://developer.atlassian.com/platform/forge/manifest-reference/modules/jira-custom-field-type/

3. A scheduled sync job that pulls the ARIS process list periodically and populates a normal Jira dropdown field – simplest to build, but it's not true live search and the list can go stale between runs.

4. Using iPaaS middleware like webMethods.io (ARIS has an official connector for it) to handle the sync instead of writing our own script – an alternative to #3.

Before committing to any of these, I'd want to confirm with the ARIS admin team that the Repository API is actually reachable from Jira Cloud (network path, auth setup), then run a quick trial of Elements Connect against a test ARIS database to make sure the autocomplete + GUID approach works end to end.