How to change issue status through email (without the use of JEMH) ?

ashygoyal January 22, 2016

Requirement: User should be able to change issue status from JIRA email, without using JEMH plugin.

Description: Please find below the detailed description of events, in order:

  1. An issue in JIRA moves from transition1 to transition2 (based on the workflow).
  2. On successful execution of Step 1, user gets an email stating "Issue moved from transition1 to transition2. To move the issue from transition2 to transition3, Please click on Approve button below"
  3. As soon as the user(developer) clicks on Approve button, issue's status in JIRA changes from transition2 to transition3.

On searching for possible solutions, all that I could observe was, that above mentioned requirement can be achieved by using the JEMH plugin. But is there any other alternative to achieve it? Any pointer would be of great help.

Thanks in advance.

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David Gordon February 10, 2017

The approvals add on uses tokens but on service desk I can only get it working with one users. It would be great to hear whether it works properly on JIRA because I have tried reaching out to the support people and as yet have had no response.

David Gordon February 12, 2017

I managed to get the Approvals add-on working in Service Desk (the problem was the user name has a capital letter).  It now works like a dream and will send an approval message and the link in the email approves directly without the need to login.  This checks the To: recipient so the message can't simply be forwarded to another person, and when transitioning adopts the profile of a generic user that you configure. 

You can download the add-on at https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.intenso.jira.plugins.jira-approvals/server/overview

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Mario Günter
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January 22, 2016

Hi Ashish, 

maybe you should take a look at Automation Plugins such as: 

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.plugin.automation.jira-automation-plugin/server/overview

Hope this helps,

Cheers,
Mario 

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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January 22, 2016

Out of curiosity, why not JEMH? It's very good at acting on emails, and almost always the first recommendation I make.

Almost all the solutions I can think of require an add-on.  JIRA's standard mail handlers only do create or comment, and the standard listeners don't do transitions, so you can't really do it with plain JIRA.

Some approaches:

  • Write a listener.  If you find/write a listener that can pick up "issue commented", it could check the content of the comment to make the transition
  • Write a mail handler that could scan an incoming email for any trigger that means "transition the issue" and act on it.
  • You've said you want an "approve" button in the email.  You could simply put the link directly to the transition as the click action, so that clicking the email opens the browser in the right place.  No need for a reply email at all.

Note that all of these will require you to amend the email template to add your button...

Andy Brook
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January 22, 2016

The approach described with links could be done in a bunch of ways using standard JIRA with customized templates, and no addons, depends on the scale of your instance whether you'd want to start doing that versus getting a solution to target the problem, and not impact any other users. 

 JEMH can support custom templates without JIRA file modification, and remote users driving workflow transitions, but  not more currently, yes, you can put links  in notifications based on condition evaluations, but that requires the user to 'login' if they are not already.  

What I'd like to see with JEMH is a new feature where clickable links are issued in emails which are one time keys to transitions  issues, that hit JEMH via REST rather than require a user login, JEMH then does the transition on behalf of the user, its #todo.

 

 

ashygoyal January 24, 2016

Hello Nic,

Thanks a lot for the valuable suggestions.

Actually I downloaded the 30-day trial version of JEMH plugin 1.7.64 (for JIRA 6.4.12 - Server). But there is no "Create a Profile" button on the Profiles tab of the plugin dashboard. Moreover, we are doing it as a 'proof of concept' thing, so we dont wish to spend on acquiring license for JEMH. This made us curious to find alternate ways to achieve the functionality of changing issue status through email. 

In regard to the third point that you mentioned, suggesting to use URL of transition in button click. This is not feasible in our case. Since those URLs involve tokens which i guess, are valid for one user session only. So we cant hard code the URL in a button, it has to dynamically generate the token everytime and fetch that URL, if at all possible.

For the first suggestion, what I get is that user will have to type a comment in JIRA, which would then be read by the listener, in turn leading to issue status change. We have some constraints here, it should be a fully automated procedure. Rather than going to JIRA and then typing the comment, user can simply click the transition button from Issue's page. But what we want is, one click on a button in the email, should do the trick. User must not visit JIRA, at all.!!

 

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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January 25, 2016

>But what we want is, one click on a button in the email, should do the trick. User must not visit JIRA, at all.!!

To do that, you would need to be using an email client that can pick up the click, recognise it as a "remote action" instead of a link, and then issue the call for the user to do it (and somehow use their JIRA credentials to do it as)

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David Yu
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September 14, 2018

@Andy Brookthe clickable links in the email would be very convenient. I think JSD now does this with an inline button in the emails, though we need this for projects that are non-JSD. Is there a Jira to track this on your roadmap?

The problem with just blanket re-opening on comment is you get a lot of false positives where a "Thank you" note re-opens a ticket.

Andy Brook
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September 14, 2018

We implemented what can be described as pre-defined automation steps in JEMH through Directive Sets in the last year or two.  The feature allows you to define actions JEMH should take when a given link is clicked in an email. 

The usefulness of this is that the user doesn't need to authenticate in order to click.  Links are generated in sets to many actions can be available as 'options', when one is used the rest are removed.  Its also possible to craft AUI styled buttons that drive such links too, specifically, for Approve / Reject workflow choices from management.

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