Can you add watchers when creating new issues?

[Patrick Horne]

I'd like to add a field to the issue creation screen that would allow me to add watchers when creating new issues. Is that possible? I haven't been able to find a way to do that.

[Jim Birch]

Yes.

1. Install the Jira Watcher Plugin

2. Under Custom Fields, create a new field

Type = Watcher Field, Name = Watchers, Description = (eg) "Watchers are notified on issue changes", Search template = Watcher Search, Issue Type = Any, Context =Global

3. Click the screens link for the new field and add it to the Default screen (on a out-of-box installation, maybe others on a customized system.)

4. In the Admin | Screens section, you can set the position of the watchers field for screens you have added it to. Near the end is probably good since creating the other issue fields will probably enhance thinking about who needs to watch it :)

5. Jira will probably want a reindex. On our moderate size reasonable grunt system this takes Jira offline for just under two minutes, YMMV.

The watchers field search has that nice type and pick functionality so it's real easy to use. We got a lot of requests for this. I'm surprised it's not OOB functionality.

[Alain Moran]

The solution that we use is to edit the issue and add the users to the cc field.

[Martin Cooper]

There is currently no out of the box solution for this. See this post: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-5493 looks like it may be on the roadmap for a future version though.

This plugin may help: https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/6306 Or there may be others out there.

You might be able to produce your own solution based around a custom field and a post condition, but this would require some customisation and development.

This blog post shows one way to do it, I cannot vouch for or verify this but looks reasonable http://justinit.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/jira-add-watchers-at-issue-creation/