Is there a way to restrict the Project prefix with Filters of sub-tasks

[DeniseThompson397]

We want to run a filter on sub-tasks but the Summary field prefixes the Project name. We want to remove this. Is this possible?

[DeniseThompson397 · Accepted solution]

Wow, Thanks for that Nic. I'll have a look, I certainly don't have a spare server knocking around, I don't even have admin access to Jira, I'm just a user. I have set up subscriptions which send emails to Lotus Notes and I can unpack the data stream from there but it requires too much coding in lotusscript and is not worth the trouble. The url idea is interesting and I can code in PHP so might just investigate but otherwise, I'll just accept that I have to export the filters manually frequently.

Thanks alot for your help.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Well, you don't technically need a "server" really, unless you want to make it all available to other people in your organisation. All you really need is any computer that can do a simple "get data from this url, and process it" and also run things regularly. (I mostly use Unix based machines nowadays, and we can pretty much assume curl, wget and cron are installed on them by default, along with the structure for writing scripts).

PHP is more than capable of fetching and processing a block of data from Jira, so as you know that, I'd say use it to your full advantage :-) I don't know about a regular scheduler, but if you don't need to share it, or even you are happy to run something on your machine regularly, that covers the "server" bit.

The only trap to be aware of is long-term movement. I've been to more than one place where a developer sets up a script to fetch something, process it, and send the results somewhere else, leaves it running under his desk, and then moves on. When his machine is reclaimed/scrapped later, a "critical" process suddenly stops and no-one can find it!

[DeniseThompson397]

Yes you are exactly right with the prediction above. I'm only trying to make my own job easier. When, and if I go at the end of my contract, I may not pass on what I have because it will be unsupported and so someone will have to go back to producing everything for management manually. At least I can leave instructions on how to sort Fix/Version for them at any rate. Thanks again.

[DeniseThompson397]

Hi Nic, I gave Curl a go, and almost got there but could not get the authentication right. Here's an example:

exec ("curl http://jira/sr/jira.issueviews:searchrequest-excel-current-fields/13194/SearchRequest-13194.xls?tempMax=5000 -o aaa_output_from_web.htm -U username: password");

I tried uppercase U and lowercase u. Any suggestions would be grateful. Thanks

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

What do you mean by "summary field prefixes the project name"? Prefix means "word that goes before another" (redo, recombine, review - words prefixed with "re"), which does not help explain what you're asking. Could you explain what you are searching for and what is wrong with it in detail?

[DeniseThompson397]

Yes I do mean Prefix, and I do know the definition. Ok, when you create a filter using key in linkedsubtasksquery(""), thereby returning a list of sub-tasks, the Summary, which may have been, for example "Take out leading zeros from field x" becomes "PRJ / Take out leading zeros... x", where PRJ is Issue or Project name. With an issue that is not a sub-task, the summary that is returned in the filter would be "Take out leading ....etc". Try it for yourself. You create a Filter which returns sub-tasks and then look at the summary field. The summary field usually is shown by default but if it is not there then you can select it using Tools etc.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I'm sorry, I wasn't clear - you said prefix, but it simply doesn't make sense in the sentence you posted, it was not referring to anything. In the sense you used it, it implied that the summary was being used as a prefix to a key, which simply does not happen in Jira. (For example, for an issue ABC-123 with summary "Mr Flibble", your sentence implies you are seeing "MrFlibbleABC-123", which I've never seen in Jira).

Anyway, your explanation is very clear.

The summary field is designed to indicate what the parent task is by adding informational displays. You can't turn it off in the UI as far as I know, but you could amend the .vm file that draws the field on-screen so that it does not do that any more.

Although, you've said you're using OnDemand, where you can't make code modifications like that.

[Jamie Echlin]

I didn't think there was any such JQL function linkedsubtasksquery()... is that really the function name, and are you definitely using ondemand?

[DeniseThompson397]

OK Thanks Nic. Also, do you know whether you can automate the export of a filter to a spreadsheet. I know you can use subscribe to automate the sending of an email to my email host which is Lotus Notes, but I want to automate the sending of certain filters to an excel spreadsheet. I'll put in a separate question for this but thought I might ask now.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Not internally, there's nothing that will automate exports. (Remember that as soon as you export a spreadsheet from a filter, it's obsolete and static, so it's not as much use as telling people "go look in Jira")

It is quite easy to automate some things though, if you've got a server knocking around that can do some basic scripting. It's actually quite a short script - one line - use curl or wget to hit a Jira url. I've only ever done it for the xml for a saved filter, but I suspect it would work for spreadsheet download too. Go to your saved filter and simply right-click the excel link to get the url for it, add that to the script, and then put the script in a scheduler (I tend to work with unix variants, so "cron" is generally available)