Feature sneak peek: Create Jira shortcuts using Apple’s Shortcuts app

[#1]

Who doesn’t like a good shortcut? (Unless we’re talking about an unintentional slip of the hair clippers.)

At Atlassian, we strive to create software that gets out of your way, lets you do stuff faster, and makes your work-life easier.

So with that in mind, let us show you a sneak peek of a feature we’re working on:

Create Jira shortcuts using Apple’s Shortcuts app. Boom.

What is the Shortcuts app?

The latest iOS 13 includes Apple’s Shortcuts app. Shortcuts is an iOS app that lets you combine different apps and services to automate one or more tasks. (Learn more about Apple’s Shortcuts app.)

We’re making Jira more discoverable – and more powerful – within Apple’s Shortcuts app. In other words, creating time-saving Jira shortcuts will soon be easy peasy. Once this feature launches, you’ll find a glorious goldmine of Jira goodness within Shortcuts.

Download Shortcuts here in the App Store.

What are the benefits of creating Jira shortcuts?

Creating shortcuts for your most common daily tasks can save you an extraordinary amount of time in the long run:

• Save time – create shortcuts for your repetitive daily tasks, like time tracking (see example below)

• Save energy – shortcuts can update your Jira issues automatically, meaning you don’t need to locate an issue, open it, and manually enter information

• Maximise consistency – shortcuts can help to keep information consistent and accurate across multiple locations (if, for example, you need to keep track of identical details within separate Jira issues for different teams and/or colleagues)

What kinds of shortcuts can be made?

• Issue template: Do you create similar Jira issues for each new sprint? Build a shortcut that creates the issues automatically for you.

• Time tracking: Integrate Jira into your toggl time tracking workflow (see example below).

• Generate and attach reports: Download the latest analytics data, convert it to a PDF and attach it to the selected Jira issue with the tap of a button.

And that’s really just the beginning. This integration between Jira and Shortcuts is like a building block. Take it and run wild. Build a shortcut city if you like. No, build a shortcut universe.

Example of one common use-case

For many users, time tracking in Jira is an essential feature. Measuring the exact time a ticket was worked on can be used for billing customers, improving future work estimations, or as a general feedback mechanism.

However, maintaining an accurate work log can be tedious and error-prone.

Jira's Shortcuts integration can make life easier. In this case, you can integrate a 3rd-party service called toggl to keep track of your time spent on a task. (Toggl’s free plan is sufficient.) The official toggl app does not (yet) have a sophisticated Shortcuts integration, but a 3rd-party app for toggl called Timery has excellent support for Shortcuts. (Timery’s free version is sufficient.)

In this example, you can use two shortcuts: Start timer and Stop timer.

The Start timer shortcut will begin a timer on toggl.com if there's not one running already. You’ll launch this shortcut when you start work on a Jira ticket.

The Stop timer shortcut is the one you run when you finish your work and you're ready to log your work.

When run, the Stop timer shortcut checks the time of the current timer on toggl and displays the elapsed time. It then gives you the option of stopping the timer and logging the work, or canceling the shortcut and letting the timer continue.

If you stop the timer, the shortcut displays the last few issues you have looked at that are assigned to you and are in progress. This is where you decide for which issue you want to log work for.

The shortcut then asks if you want to add a comment to your work log. Here you can list all the things you did for that issue. This comment is also used to update the current timer's description on toggl. This helps to keep the log in both toggl and Jira in sync.

The shortcut then adds a work log to the selected issue and asks if you want to open the issue in the Jira app. This can be handy if you need to further update the issue.

Both the Jira issue and the toggl timer are now updated accordingly. Note that the ‘Started at’ time in the Jira work log is automatically adjusted to match when the timer was started. Instantaneous consistency for the win!

Pssst... Let Siri do it!

That's right. Embrace the power of Siri. Seriously. We're Siri-ous. (Too much?)

• "Hey Siri, start work."
• "Hey Siri, finish work."

Siri can log time for you, attach the logged time to your Jira issue, add a description... Too easy. 

When will Jira+Shortcuts be shipped?

We’re working on this feature right now, along with a load of other cool features. As you probably know, the world of software development is full of unexpected twists and turns, so we can’t give you an exact date of when we’ll be shipping this feature.

Share your thoughts!

Want to give us feedback about this feature, or a different one? Shake your mobile device (if shake is enabled*), or simply go to your account > Send feedback.

*What do you mean, “Shake my device”? Well, go to your account > Settings > Enable ‘shake to send feedback’. Shaking your device is unexpectedly satisfying. Try it.

[Josh Carolan]

Really cool to see this integration and can't wait to see what other interesting use cases people have to automate their Jira flows on their phone! 

[Ian Applebaum]

Want it. Need it. Gotta have it. Please let it work with Jira Server App 🥺

[Kirill Putryk]

Hi, I tried to make a shortcut in my iPhone, but unfortunately it is not possible to list any issue in shortcut (even though I can see some in sugestions...). Do you have same error anybody? If so, can you help me please? I would love to report my time faster and this shortcut would help a lot!:) thanks

[Simon Stiefel]

Hi @Kirill Putryk ,

Thanks for reaching out!

Could you please elaborate on what you are trying to achieve and what error you're seeing?

There are two actions that let you retrieve an issue:

• "Choose Issue" if you know the issue key for the issue
• "Run JQL" that lets you run a query against your instance and returns all matching issues

To look at different fields of an issue, you can run the "Get Issue Field Value" action after you fetched an issue with one of the two actions above.

Thanks,

Simon

[Kirill Putryk]

Hi @Simon Stiefel ,

thank you for your help. I am trying to have shortcut which will work like this:

I turn it on - it asks me to choose from my issues - after that I enter time (30 minutes), comment and log it into issue. 

when I run JQL I can see my Issues, but unfortunately I do not know how to use any of it in my shortcut :). 

maybe it is not as easy as I thought it will be. I have to run JQL first, choose issue and then run log time? Here are my printscreens.

Thank you. 
Kirill

[Simon Stiefel]

Hey @Kirill Putryk ,

Thanks for the explanation! I think what you're trying to do should be easily doable by just using three Shortcuts actions:

• "Run JQL" - To query for the issues that you want to chose from. For example, you could query only issues that are assigned to you and that are In Progress.
• "Choose from List" - This is a built-in action in the Scripting section of Shortcuts. You can pass the output from the JQL action straight into this action and it will give you a dialog to choose one of the issues.
• "Log Work" - The output from the previous action can be plugged right into this action. Fill in the other parameters (or display extra UI to add more user input like comments) and you're good to go.

In the end, the shortcut should look like this:

I hope this helps! Please let me know if you run into other issues. Happy to help.

Thanks,

Simon

[levente rádler]

Hi @Simon Stiefel

Very good explanation for the question above!!
I've been trying to make a shortcut just like this one with a few extras, but sadly i just can't seem to make the pre-built "Log Work" action work 😞  Is there an extra permission setting that i forgot to enable that allows you to do such things? However I can log my time spent on the mobile app and in the browser, so i guess i have permission to log work, but maybe thats not enough? 

Thank you for your answer, 
Levente

PS.: I was amazed by the power of your pre-built actions, that "Run JQL" action blowed my mind 😀 thanks again and keep up the good work

[Kirill Putryk]

Hi guys,

same error here :D and same amuzement woth JQL action!:)

I am global admin of my Jira and I have same problem with loging time. Can the problem be, that we use Tempo pLogin for time report? 

Thank you. 
Kirill

[Simon Stiefel]

Hi @levente rádler and @Kirill Putryk ,

Interesting! If the action doesn't work, the problem might be that the input variables are not in the correct format.

What I try to in this case is to inspect the values using the "View Content Graph" action. For example, I get the same error if I put in a negative number in the "Time Spent" field.

If you put in values by hand (i.e. without using variables), does that make it work?

The other possible issue could be that you use Tempo as a Time Tracking plugin. I haven't tested that case but the action might not work with Tempo.

I hope this helps!

Simon

[levente rádler]

Hi @Simon Stiefel ,

Thank you very much for your help, but unfortunately I've already tried that :(

On the picture I select one of the issues by hand, the selection works as expected (I tried putting in wrong value to make sure, and also viewed the content graph where everything seemed fine) as you can see the other values should be valid for the action.(I've tried putting 9am as time as in your example, and also putting the comment values between "" as you did)

Also I intentionally tried wrong values to see if I made the mistake that you mentioned, but sadly (or to be honest not) they've returned with the appropriate error messages, all except the ones that are in the "Log work" action, they all return the same unknown error message.

Really appreciate your help, thank you 

Levente 

[Kirill Putryk]

Hi @levente rádler - thank you for more technical guide in this error :) I hope @Simon Stiefel and you will find where is the problem!!!

[Simon Stiefel]

Hi @levente rádler ,

The shortcut looks okay, maybe it is a configuration issue.

Could you please verify that:

• Time tracking is setup properly as described here: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/configure-time-tracking/
• The time tracking provider is set to "JIRA provided time tracking" (In Issues settings)
• Your user has the "Work On Issues" permission
• You can log work through the web with the same user that you use in the app

Hope this helps!

Simon

[Kirill Putryk]

Hi @Simon Stiefel  and @levente rádler ,

I just tried my shortcut and it works! I did not change anything...

Awesome - I hope it will stay that way :D

Thank you for your help

Kirill

[Josh Allen]

How do I create new issue and assign to myself?

I've successfully created the issue in my backlog, but I haven't been able to figure out how to also assign it to me.

What am I missing?

I've tried:

Set Issue Field Value, but is Assignee a field or something other than that?

[Simon Stiefel]

@Josh Allen I am sorry you hit this problem. Unfortunately, user fields (like Assignee) are currently read-only. I'll raise this as a feature request in our team.

[Josh Allen]

Awesome, thanks @Simon Stiefel !

No problem at all. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

[JP]

Hi @Simon Stiefel! I wanted to ask which fields can I get when I run the "Get Issue Field Value" (and how to ID them properly).

I'm trying to retrieve the Due Date and specific custom fields on each issue gathered from a JQL.

[Simon Stiefel]

Hi @JP ,

At the moment the following field types are supported (RO = Read-only / RW = Read-write):

• Checkbox (RW)
• Component (RW)
• Issue Type (RO)
• Label (RW)
• Number (RW)
• Option (RW)
• Priority (RW)
• Project (RO)
• Resolution (RO)
• Sprint (RO)
• Status (RO)
• Story Points (RW)
• Text (RW)
• URL (RW)
• User (e.g. Assignee) (RO)
• Single Version (RW)
• Multi Version (RW)

Date fields are currently not supported but I'll look into adding them.

Cheers,

Simon

[Simon Stiefel]

@JP I've also added support for Date (used by Due Date) and Timestamp fields. These will be available in version 150 of our app which will be released in about 2 weeks.

Hope this helps!

Simon

[JP]

Thanks, @Simon Stiefel! I'll look forward to implementing this on my shortcut.

[elyfar]

@Simon Stiefel I would like to be able to create new issues and link them to the parent issue. 

Need to be able to read/write in Parent ID field. Or being able to write in Linked issues field could resolve it too.

[Arnd Layer]

Hi,

is there a consolidated documentation for iOS shortcuts actions with Jira?

parsing a 2 year old announcement article feels sub optimal.

I'm trying to retrieve the parent field of an issue in order to create a todo list in apple notes. Shortcuts tells me the field does not exist.

[Simon Stiefel]

Hi Arnd,

Thanks for calling this out. Unfortunately, we currently don't have separate documentation for it but I'll forward your request to the team.

As for the parent field, unfortunately, it is currently not supported via shortcuts. I'll have a look if it can be added.

Thank you,

Simon

[Neil Simpson]

Shortcuts doesn’t seem to be able to access any value lists from the Jira app on iOS. When running or setting up it doesn’t allow me to select the project, the issue type, search for issues by number… pretty much completely broken. 

[Neil Simpson]

I’ve restarted the device. I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled Jira. I’m not using the jira beta do I need to be?