REST APIs and webhooks: deprecation of the Epic Link, Parent Link and other related fiel

[Darryl Lee]

HUH not sure why this article has comments closed. It's kind of a big deal and I wanted to tag in some folks:

REST APIs and webhooks: deprecation of the Epic Link, Parent Link and other related fields 

Yo, @Bill Sheboy and @John Funk did you see this?

Deprecated behavior: For issues in company-managed projects, stop consuming the Epic Link, Parent Link, or epic fields.

New behavior: For issues in company-managed projects, consume the parent field.

I haven't done a search, but like at least some of our answers regarding Automation have referenced Epic Link, Parent Link and epic fields.

[Darryl Lee]

I suppose there's no need to panic though:

To minimize disruptions to your work please review the full announcement at Developer Community Atlassian (reply to that announcement if you have any questions) which includes a breakdown of the affected APIs and webhooks, and make the necessary changes prior to 31 May 2022.

[Darryl Lee]

I should probably tag in the author, @Konstantin Kulishenkov too.

[Bill Sheboy]

Thanks @Darryl Lee and...

• Perhaps the author and team do not want to start a never-ending thread of people commenting on this very high-impact issue and decision.  (Pause to consider how many vendor apps will be impacted.)  Perhaps a better platform for this announcement would have been the weekly post/email on changes.
• Perhaps Atlassian is going to fix/improve the disparity in parent/child relationships created with the solution approach for team-managed projects

If indeed that second one is on track, and resolved, it would reduce confusion in automation rule branching.  I just saw yet another post where someone picked the wrong branch type (there are a couple for epics).

Kind regards,
Bill

[Konstantin Kulishenkov]

Hi @Darryl Lee and @Bill Sheboy

thanks for raising this.

We're very keen to hear any feedback from our Community on this announcement. The reason we've closed the comments here is that we'd like to keep the discussion to Developer Community Atlassian only.

Having a single source of truth would allow us to reply to all comments in a timely manner, and avoid duplicating questions.

I've updated my post here to make it more clear.

Please feel free to reply to our post at Developer Community Atlassian with any questions/concerns you have.

Thanks,
Konstantin

[Darryl Lee]

Hey @Konstantin Kulishenkov - that makes some sense since as @Bill Sheboy points out this hits Vendors pretty hard.

HOWEVER. As @David Fischer rightly points out:

...while all this makes perfect sense, it creates a fairly major risk: what about customers of Automation apps (such as JMWE, JSU, ScriptRunner, etc.) that wrote automations that depend on the Parent Link or Epic Link fields, or on the issuelink_created and issuelink_deleted webhook events?

While app vendors are (or should be) watching this space, and thus can adapt their apps to these changes by the deadline, regular Jira customers won’t hear about these changes before they break their automations. And as you know, app vendors have very limited means of communicating with their customers (only a single “technical contact” email which is often obsolete) so we can’t communicate these changes to our customers.

ADDITIONALLY as Automation is now "free" with Cloud, there are a lot of users and administrators in this community that will be very interested that their rules might break due to this change.

I would propose that it would behoove Atlassian to write a tool to scan a sites' existing rulesets and alert administrators of any impacted rules. Or better still, proposing changes and offering a one-click migration.

(For about 15 seconds just now I considered writing a quick and dirty script to grep through the exported JSON and identify rules that will need to be fixed. Heck, with a bit of work you could probably edit the rules too, but then you'd have to import them, and you'd end up with duplicates, and ok, now I'm tired just thinking about it. :-)

[Konstantin Kulishenkov]

Hi @Darryl Lee and @Bill Sheboy

Atlassian plans to migrate the affected smart values by 31 May 2022 so that Automation rules won’t break.

If there are any edge cases we're unable to migrate, we'll make sure to communicate this closer to the time.

I've updated my original post with these details.

Thanks,
Konstantin