How to: Bridging with JIRA

The Jira Bridge allows you to get information about projects,issues,groups and users from a Jira instance.

Developing with Jira

This bridge uses the REST API to make query calls to Rackspace so that the desired information can be retrieved. A list of the structures and their fields and possible qualification parameters can be found here.

Step 1: Configuring the Bridge

After installing the bridge, we need to also configure it so that it can have access to the information and data that it needs. There are only two things that need to be done before we can get information from Rackspace. The first step is to enter your username and password into the Bridge Settings. The second is to enter the url of the base site of your Jira instance for the 'Base Site' parameter.

Warning: This bridge uses basic authentication, which means your username and password are being sent over an insecure connection if SSL is not configured for the base site.

Step 2: Kinetic Bridge Manager Configuration

To continue configuring the bridge, open up the Kinetic Bridge (in Space). In this tutorial, we will return information on Jira Issues. Under the Bridges tab, add your new bridge and copy over the bridge URL from the Bridge Console page you just finished configuring.

Structures

  • List of valid structures with the Jira Bridge
    • Issue
    • Project
    • Group
    • User
  • Create a new Model with a Model Name of 'Issue'.
  • Select the Model Name to add the Attributes (fields) that we want to retrieve from Jira
    ie. We might want to retrieve the Name and Key of an Issue.
  • Create a Qualification, which will determine how you limit what information is returned to you
    ie. A qualification of By Project will allow you to limit the issues to issues that are assigned to a specific project.
  • For each Qualification, add the parameter that will be sorting by to the Qualification Parameter
    ie. The By Project qualification parameter is Project

Mappings

  • Select the model that you wish to map
  • Select one of the attributes that you created in the Structure section
    Fill in the structure field with the string <%=field["FieldName"]%>, where FieldName is the name of your field
    ie. If we are mapping the Name, the field mapping would be <%=field["summary"]%>
    Set up the Qualification Mappings, which is used to put the qualifications into proper format
    ie. Using our By Project qualification, the mapping would be project=<%=parameter["Project"]%>

Step 3: Using Your Bridge In a Service Item

Now that you have it all configured, using this bridge in a service item is the last step! Now that we have the Issue model all configured, let's say we want to pull up a list of all the Issues currently tied to the Kinetic Bridges project.

Creating a List of Issues

  • Create a new question with an answer type of Dynamic List and select the Use Bridging checkbox.
  • Select Issue for the Model and select the Qualification scheme that you would like to use (in this case, we are using By Project)
  • The Label is what is shown to the user, so Name is a good choice because that is what the user most commonly uses to identify a server.
  • The Value is what the system reads, so if you search for this issue, the Key is a good choice because it is always unique.
  • The last step is to choose the parameter value for our qualification. If we want to return a list of all the Issues tied to the Kinetic Bridges project, the parameter will be the key of the project, which in this case would be KB.
    • Using * as a parameter value will always cause the query to return all possible results
    • If we wanted to specify and return issues with only a specific name or key, we could create a new qualification and then input the parameter value that will relate to those issues.