How to display company/affiliation near Jira usernames?

Sorin Sbarnea (Citrix)
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September 5, 2012

I am looking for a scalable solution that would allow me to display company / affiliation of jira usernames near ther name.

It seems that Atlassian already implemented this on Answers (OSQA) but failed to add this feature to their own products.

The use case is the same: you want to see who is from inside, who is a partner or a customer. Email address is a good source of information, still it cannot replace the username.

Example:

John Doe with john.doe@acme.com having username johnd should appear as "johnd [acme]" or "John Doe [acme]" when the full name is displayed.

How to implement this?

Note: this has to be implemented at view level, modifying the database is not a solution because username, and full names can be stored in external directories (LDAP).

1 answer

2 votes
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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September 5, 2012

It's not implemented in OSQA the way you have described. There's a field on the profile that you can fill in and it gets appended. You can put anything you want in there, it's nothing to do with your email address, website or anything else.

Try whacking a random string in there. As an example, I can set mine to Kitteh, my email to a home address, my website to a company one, and they all come out differently. It's just a string. I could put "Atlassian" in there if I felt like it. (I don't, I'm not working for them)

It gets harder in Jira because there's no such thing as "user fields". It simply doesn't have a way to tag fields to users. (There are user properties, but they're too inflexible to be useful in this way)

There's a number of requests for user-level fields in Atlassian's Jira, but I suspect they won't really get done - the place for user details is in a user management system (e.g. Crowd) and I think the best you'll get in Jira in the long run is "display user information from your user management system"

Harry Chan
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September 5, 2012

The way Atlassian do this in JIRA currently is just a hack on the last name to tack on [company]. I've seen lots of other users follow the same path. Not suggesting you do this as you can't, but as Nic says there's isn't a solution right now.

Sorin Sbarnea (Citrix)
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September 5, 2012

Thanks Nic, in fact I am looking for a solution just to alter how the full name is rendered by jira, as I can include the logic of what to append inside the altering code. I do not need to store additional information about the users, I already have everything I need for them: username, email and full name.

Another idea woudl be to change how you render usernames and even their icons based on the group memberships.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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September 5, 2012

Gottit - https://developer.atlassian.com/display/JIRADEV/User+Format+Plugin+Module

Unfortunately, that seems to be for V4. I don't know if it works in V5 (I was only looking to use a nicer format that the one I'd whacked into a plugin because I didn't know any better)

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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September 5, 2012

I'm pretty sure there's a handful of user renderers in later versions of Jira, and you can add your own. If the information you want to display is already in Jira somewhere, then writing one of those would probably solve the problem. Although you may want to override one of the built-in ones rather than add a new one.

I was only looking at this the other day (for something unrelated). Give me a sec to dig through my browser history.

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