How to access JIRA issue data from Confluence via User Macro velocity script?

[Chris Rocco]

I have recently started wrting user macros. They are cool and powerful. I am really looking forward to further customizing my confluence site. Here is what I am trying to do and am looking for some help:

I want to write a marco to very similar to the JIRA issue macro, but with a twist. I want to:

1. Allow a user to drop the macro on a page
2. Click edit macro
3. enter a JIRA URL for a list of issues (e.g. XML)
4. I want my new macro to:
   1. Have access to the jira issues
   2. And be able to act on them in my velocity script - e.g. count the number of issues, access the values in certain fields, etc.

I am not sure how to do everything in 4 above. Can I read the XML into an array? Can I loop through the data in the XML and parse it?

Can I view the source code on the JIRA issue macro and start from there?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

[StephenG]

Did you find an answer to this in the end?

[francis]

Did you consider the SQL plugin for confluence. It allows you to query the jira db directly, not really the jira issues macro but a valid alternative imo.