Confluence Button Macro and Issue Collector

[Bradley]

I wanted to know if there is any way to use the Button creator macro in confluence to trigger issue collector. If so how can you get it to do it? I've tried and can't seem to figure it out. I'm not a programmer which is why I try to use the Macro Functions for items in Confluence, before digging around in HTML. 

[Mykenna Cepek]

I have recently set up several teams with a Button on a Confluence page which brings up a "Create Issue" dialog in Jira. Users fill it out, and a new Issue gets added to the Backlog of a Project in Jira.

You can do this with out-of-the-box functionality -- no Marketplace add-ons required (but some can be helpful, as noted).  Also no HTML/coding or issue collector configuration is required with this approach.

Here's what the Confluence page looks like:

Our Confluence instance includes three Macros that provide "button" functionality:  Blue Button, Handy Button, and UI Button. They probably came from some Confluence Marketplace add-ons, but I couldn't tell you which ones. I used the "Blue Button" macro above.

A button Macro just formats it on the page like a friendly button, but you can use a simple hyperlink on the page to accomplish the same thing. To "fake it" using out-of-the-box Confluence, use a hyperlink in a 1x1 table cell, which allows you to color the cell background (e.g. blue) and link text (e.g. white).

The URL for the button/hyperlink is constructed from two parts:

• The first part comes from the "Create" button that shows in Jira when you are just viewing the Board or Backlog of your project, but remove the end part.
• The second part identifies the Project and Issue Type.

The entire URL looks something like this (for our Data Center instance):

https://jira.companyname.com/secure/CreateIssue.jspa?issuetype=12345&pid=9876

The "issuetype" value identifies which type of issue you want the Create dialog to start with. The "pid" identifies the Jira Project. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader how to find those IDs in your Jira instance. (Hints: hovering over things in a list will sometimes reveal them; or hit the Jira REST API from a browser).

We use a specific Issue Type ("Request") for these types of Issues. That helps to easily identify how they made it into the Project. It also allows the Create dialog to be simplified, as described below.

You'll probably find that the raw "create issue" dialog in Jira offers too many fields. You'll want to keep things as simple as possible for users and stakeholders. To simplify that dialog, create a new Screen Scheme and Screen for that Issue Type. Then you can edit the Screen and remove fields you don't want to show.

We offer just "Summary", "Description" and "Attachments". Having a specific Issue Type in the Project just for these Requests is required for configuring a simpler Screen.

If you have any "template" type add-ons for your Jira, they can help here too. Automatically filling in certain fields can be handy. We have teams that use issue templates to fill in the "Description" field with questions for the users/stakeholders to answer.

Here's what our Create Screen dialog looks like (with the template content for the Description field removed):

The bottom of the Confluence (first) screenshot above shows another nice-to-have -- the "Jira Issue/Filter" Macro, which is configured to show this JQL:

project=XYZ AND reporter=currentUser() order by created 

Whoever is viewing the page then sees all the Requests that (only) they have submitted for this Project. They are sorted most-recent-first, with the Status of each and other (configurable) information showing. This makes it easy for them to monitor the progress on their Requests, and even see who to contact (Assignee).

Hope that helps get you started in the right direction!