Embed JIRA issue collector

[Ryan Hill]

Hi

I am looking to embed a JIRA issue collector into my confluence cloud page.

What is the best way to do this?

Thanks 

[Daniel Eads]

Hi Ryan, welcome to the Community!

There is built-in functionality to create Jira issues in Confluence by highlighting text, and then selecting "Create Jira issue" on the popup that appears. More information about this feature is available in our product documentation. 

Additionally, there is an open feature request to allow embedded Jira issue collectors on Confluence pages: CONFCLOUD-26038 

If the issue collector is what you really need vs creating an issue from the built-in functionality, you could also get the issue collector HTML from Jira and embed it on a page using one of the several Marketplace apps that allows you to add HTML content to Confluence Cloud.

Cheers,
Daniel

[William Wilson]

Good lord almighty in the heaven's above!

So. Let's just break this down.

Atlassian makes Jira.

Atlassian makes Confluence. 

I can embed a Jira issue or filter into Confluence, no problem.

I can embed an issue collector elsewhere in the world easily, with NO REGARD for security.

I can not embed an issue collector into a Confluence page, which is a side by side sibling product. Part of a suit of products, all marketed to "work together".

Why? Because it requires it to be wrapped in an HTML macro... which is insecure. HOWEVER... And oddly enough... if you want to pay for a third party add-on, the security concern magically vanishes!

And... this is where it gets annoying.

I can use "forms" (if the project is a work management project) to embed a "form" that collects issues in a confluence page... 

The FORM is not insecure enough to cause Atlassian to hamstring it!!!

Embedded Jira issues are not insecure!

But... They say the COLLECTOR *IS* insecure. Because, it must be wrapped in an HTML macro. HOWEVER... AGAIN... Using "Forms" is fine!!! AND... if you PAY for an add-on, no worries! Use the collector ALL YOU LIKE!

AS LONG AS YOU SPEND THOSE SWEET SWEET MARKETPLACE BUCKS!

Friends. This is gaslighting at it's finest. This is also what happens when Atlassian collects revenue from the add-on marketplace AND it's core product. 

All internal work to add value to the product grinds to a halt, because it is not generating ADDED revenue as part of the core product. It is only by pushing simple things like this off to the marketplace that they will generate ADDITIONAL revenue above and beyond the now over-priced core products that continue to see features dropped in favor of the marketplace add-ons. As is evidenced here.

The evidence shows repeatedly that, as Atlassian customers, our voices mean nothing to Atlassian as a company.

I will be looking elsewhere when doing our roadmap planning.

[Daniel Eads]

Hi @William Wilson ,

You mentioned roadmap planning - I want to make sure you're aware that you can create multiple issues at once from a table in Confluence. This is significantly faster than manually entering issues one-at-a-time in a collector or directly in Jira.

No add-ons or additional sites required. This is a standard feature of Confluence Cloud when you have Jira connected. Highlighting text in a table while in View mode, and then clicking "Create Issue" gives you a dialogue to do this. Using the "Create multiple issues from table" link lets you choose which columns are the summary and description fields, and gives you a list of all the issues it will create based on the table rows.

This tutorial from one of our product managers shows how the feature works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpuMAfBwf_8

Cheers,
Daniel

[William Wilson]

Hello @Daniel Eads 

I do appreciate your response. I'd like to urge you to re-read my complaint. Maybe something I said in this thread unintentionally inferred I was mentioning roadmap planning. I can't see it, so I'd like you to highlight it for me.

Also, I'm not sure at all, how your response relates to the comparison of how an HTML wrapper is too insecure to be included as part of the core product, but it's perfectly reasonable to install if you pay for it. 

I'm not interested in bulk issue uploads. I'm interested in the ability to embed something in a Confluence page that will allow my confluence users to create Jira issues (one at a time), from a Confluence page. 

I did find a work-around which makes it work, but can be hard to navigate, and not at all seamless... But!!! You can BUY AN ADD-ON to make it look more seamless. Which, I feel is something you should be able to do in a WIKI product. 

You used to be able to do things like this with the core product. And now you can't. UNLESS YOU PAY FOR IT. WIKI: a website that allows collaborative editing of its content and structure by its users. And yet, if I want to remove a table border in Confluence, I have to buy an add-on to do it. Does Atlassian even realize how insulting that is?

So, in case it's not clear... My complaint is that Atlassian has shifted the bulk of it's public facing development to *recurring* *paid* subscriptions in the marketplace, without adjusting the base price to reflect how much of the base product has been moved from part of the core product, to a paid "revenue stream" item.

Until a valid debate can be made, I do not see this as unreasonable.

[Daniel Eads]

Hi @William Wilson ,

The last sentence in your original comment reads:

I will be looking elsewhere when doing our roadmap planning.

Given the context of the follow-up comment, I can see that I misread the intent as "looking for help with roadmap planning features" when instead it was "I would like to migrate off Confluence in the future". My apologies on the confusion!

To your point on features changing, I'd say that's fair! Over the years, some things that were part of Confluence from early versions have been stripped out as the internet has changed, or as the expectations of the userbase have shifted. When that original HTML function was added to Confluence Server way back when, HTTPS wasn't even standard on most sites. The shift to Cloud showed a security flaw in the way it was implemented, and our product team made a decision to simply turn it off than rebuild it on Cloud, given that the marketplace had already implemented better apps for that functionality and the overall usage of the native feature was low.

Prior to joining Atlassian, I was a Jira/Confluence Server administrator and made use of many plugins. These were the life-blood several workstreams I maintained using Jira and Confluence. Several of the things I relied on plugins for are now native functions in the applications!

I see your mention of table styling, but I'll keep focused on the original question of issue collectors here. Just know that I did read the concern and the general advice continues... Most sites were not using the custom CSS feature in Cloud, so it was deprecated and then removed. The focus shifted to other things many users were mentioning; they wanted simplified editing and responsive pages. That can be really disappointing when the thing that got removed was a feature you were making use of.

Prioritizing work on other features such as Smart Links solved the need for HTML embeds for most folks. I think that feature can help out here for the use-case you mentioned for creating single issues. This is a native, no-apps-needed feature. I'll show how this might be useful below with JSM. This doesn't work like you need for Jira Software only, so I'll include a much hackier alternate method below that if you only have Jira Software.

Jira Service Management

When I think "easy place to submit a ticket", I generally think the customer portal on a Service Management project. The simplified view keeps users from having to see details they might not know the answers to. If you have Jira Service Management, you can easily embed the customer portal with a smart link:

1. Visit the customer portal and navigate to the specific request type you want to embed. Copy the URL to your clipboard
   
   
   
2. On the Confluence page you want to embed the form, paste the URL. Confluence converts this to a smart link:
   
3. Click on the link in the Confluence editor. A menu appears, and you can select Embed from the display options:
   
   
   
4. Publish the page - you've now got an embedded Jira Service Management request form that users can submit issues from without leaving Confluence:
   

Jira Software

Alright, let's say you don't have Jira Service Management and want to embed the "Create Issue" form from Jira Software. Some additional parameters will need to be pulled out in order to do it. This one is quite a bit hackier.

Unfortunately you can't use this method to embed the Issue Collector itself, as the Issue Collector does a remote script call that isn't supported through this method. I know, yes - that's the crux of the complaint about including HTML macros via marketplace apps. This won't be precisely pretty, but it is a method to get it done without additional apps.

Normally when you click Create in Jira Software, it pops open a modal dialogue so you don't have to leave wherever you're at. This isn't what we want for embedding the Create screen. You can get to the Create screen alone with this URL pattern:

yoursite.atlassian.net/secure/CreateIssue.jspa?pid=10000&issuetype=10001

We just replace these parameters:

• yoursite - make this whatever.atlassian.net to match your site's URL
• pid - this is the project ID
• issuetype - the issue type ID

Project ID

Find this by navigating to the Project Settings for the project in question, and going to the Details tab. The pid will be at the end of the URL for this page.

Issue Type ID

While you're still in the Project Settings:

1. Click "Issues" on the left sidebar to expand that section out
2. Click "Types" in the submenu
3. In the main pane, click the name of the Issue Type you want to embed
4. The issue type ID will be in the URL:
   

Put all three pieces in to the URL, and you get the basic Create Issue screen:

Now to embed that in Confluence! Unfortunately Smart Links don't seem to work with this URL scheme, so we'll need to use an iFrame instead.

1. Add an iFrame to the confluence page in edit mode, using /iframe in the editor
2. The editor for the iframe options pops out on the right side of the editor - enter the URL we copied from Jira there
3. Set the width to 100%
4. Set the height to 1000px or however high you need for the Create Issue screen you see in the editor
5. Set scrolling to auto
6. Set other parameters if you wish (title, border, etc)

The results are... interesting.

I personally might recommend putting a nice "Create Issue" image on the page instead and hyperlinking it to that Create Issue page (effectively making a button that opens a new tab). But if it needs to all be on one page, this could work.