New module and REST APIs for Jira Cloud apps

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At Atlassian we often say customer feedback is a gift. Thanks to your guiding insight, the Jira Cloud Ecosystem team has spent the last few months on delivering features that were highly requested, voted and discussed by app developers. Read on to learn what new features are now available for Jira Cloud apps.

Project page module

The new Jira Cloud user interface focuses on keeping Jira users working inside of a single project, and navigating between the different aspects of that project, like boards, backlogs, and issues. We want to help app developers provide the same great navigation experience without taking the user out of the context of the project.

For that purpose we’ve released a dedicated project page module, which offers rich configuration capabilities with control over content layout that were not available in web panels. It is also more straightforward to implement and maintain, compared to the older former solution using a web item with a web panel. Refer to the project page module documentation for details and learn how to add a link to Jira project sidebar. You can also follow this guide, which demonstrates usage of the project page module in an example app.

Bulk update of issue entity properties

Entity properties have been hugely successful from day one, becoming the most essential feature of the Jira Cloud API. With the growing popularity and usage of entity properties, we heard from app developers consistently that setting or updating property values could be improved. Especially for issue properties, often apps need to update the same property on tens or hundreds of issues. Previously, this would mean the app needs to make tens or hundreds of requests to Jira Cloud � one for each issue.

In order to make this process easier and faster we built an API for bulk setting and deleting issue entity properties, which allows the app to update one property (identified by the property key) on a number of issues in a single call. Our test results demonstrate that it takes some 200ms to update 100 issues this way, comparing to 2 seconds when updating them independently! Details on how to use this API are available in the documentation.

REST API for getting Screen IDs

Jira Cloud REST API offers a range of endpoints for working with issue screens. It turned out that using those APIs was quite cumbersome, because, while each endpoint requires relevant Screen ID in the request, there was no way to obtain those Screen IDs within the Jira Cloud REST API. We’re filling this gap by providing a method to get all screens, which returns a list of all screens with their names and IDs. Now, managing fields and tabs on issue screens will be much smoother.

Improvements to comment webhooks

Sending of comment objects in issue webhooks has been deprecated for over a year now, and replaced with comment webhooks. You made us aware that comment webhooks are missing some features that are available for issue webhooks, and your apps cannot use them in a similar way. Lack of issue context in the comment webhook was the most critical, as the webhook clients could not associate the comment with the issue. We solved this problem by adding a limited issue representation to comment webhook payload. On top of that, we enabled filtering of comment webhooks with JQL so that only relevant webhook events are fired.

With these two enhancements in place, we are soon going to remove comment objects from issue webhooks, and consequently stop sending issue webhooks for comment events. This change will start taking effect from January 22nd, and will be fully rolled out to all Jira Cloud instances by the end of January 2018.

REST API documentation has a new home

As many of you already noticed, the Jira Cloud REST API reference documentation is now fully integrated into the developer.atlassian.com site. It provides the readers not only with smooth navigation experience and mobile view, but also creates a collection of the API endpoints in Postman with just a click of a button. This is one step to making it easier for you to test API requests.

Judging by the number of votes and comments on the above feature requests, we hope that they made many app developers happy and will help you build great apps for Jira. As usual, you can check the Jira Cloud Platform API roadmap to get the latest insight into our thinking about future plans.