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The waiting is over - The Scheduler is finally available for JIRA Cloud!
About The Scheduler
The Scheduler allows you to define what we call "Scheduled Issues" that will automatically create standard JIRA Issues at selected time, date or in chosen intervals. Scheduled Issues are defined on the project level, which means you can create and manage them for each project independently, without the need for JIRA Administration access.
Scheduled Issue Concept
A Scheduled Issue consists of two elements: an Issue Template, and a Trigger Definition, that you define using a user-friendly wizard.
Issue Template
Issue template is basically a definition of an issue you plan to create. You can define it using a form that closely resembles JIRA's native "Create Issue" form (with few exceptions, described later on):
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For issue templates we support all JIRA issue types, and most of the field types (with "Attachment" being an exception). You can get into it after accessing a particular project - see below:
Trigger Definition
Once you define a template, you can define how often The Scheduler should create the issue for you. You can either use the user-friendly trigger picker, or simply provide a Quartz cron expression to define the interval. This is set on the final stage, after clicking "Create" button, as presented above.
The below illustrates its location and outlook:
Manual Scheduled Issues
That being said, Trigger Definition is actually optional - you can simply create a "Manual" Scheduled Issue that you can then execute manually from the Scheduled Issues tab panel. This is a perfect solution if you want to simply define a number of Issue Templates that you would rather create "on demand" than to create them periodically.
Creating Scheduled Issues
There are a couple of ways to create new Scheduled Issue:
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Below images present where those elements can be found:
Scheduled Issue Wizard
No matter which option you chose, you'll end up in the "Scheduled Issue Wizard" dialog that allows you to define Scheduled Issue attributes, such as name or description, the Issue Template and define the desired trigger.
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Besides the actual period, you can also specify the start and end dates for the Trigger to be in effect. By default, the trigger is always started (Start Date is set to "Now"), and it never expires (End Date set to "Never"). You can modify these dates to fit your particular use case (i.e. - see above).
Adding Scheduled Issue to Active Sprint
Starting from version 2.2.0 you can set Scheduled Issue to be created in Active Sprint - if there is no active sprint , the creation of SI will fail.
Managing Scheduled Issues
Scheduled Issues can be managed by using "Scheduled Issues" tab panel on each project view, with version 2.2.0 Scheduler have its own icon for even quicker access
Scheduled Issue Action Menu
Action menu can be accessed from the "Actions" column in the Scheduled Issues table. It provides a number of scheduled-issue-oriented actions, such as:
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- Execution history - displays an execution history for a particular Scheduled Issue, along with the information when has the issue been created,
- Execute - manually executes a Scheduled Issue (state of such must be active → the quickest way to turn it on at this stage is to click "Activate" in the presented above drop-down menu),
- Clone - creates a full copy of this Scheduled Issue,
- Activate / Inactivate - allows to quickly change Scheduled Issue status,
- Edit - allows you to edit a Scheduled Issue,
- Remove - permanently removes a Scheduled Issue
Expired Scheduled Issues
Scheduled Issue can expire only if you've defined a custom Trigger end date (the default setting is to never expire). The "Expired" state indicates that according to the Trigger definition, this Scheduled Issue will never be executed again. That being said, you can still execute this Scheduled Issue manually, or edit it to modify the Trigger so that the Scheduled Issue can be executed again.
Failed Scheduled Issues
As you surely know, JIRA is a truly complicated system, and also a highly-configurable one. While it is generally a huge benefit, as it allows you to do wonders and optimize it for your particular use-cases, it can also be great problem when it comes to the overall consistency. With all its configuration options, JIRA can be considered a dynamic system, which sometimes tends to break things. If you're a system administrator, you most likely understand that changing some piece of configuration in one place (like editing the workflow) can result in a problem in some other place.
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Because of such situations, we've introduced a "Failed" state, which denotes that, for some reason, The Scheduler failed to execute and hence to create the issue. Whenever a "Failed" state is reached, you need to manually fix the Scheduled Issue by simply editing it and providing the required fields. Once you do that, the Scheduled Issue will get "Active" again and will start working again.
Scheduler Access Management
To change rights of who can and who cannot create issues via The Scheduler add-on please follow the below steps:
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On a newly loaded page:
Finally you will see:
Scheduler Notifications
This feature allow you to send notifications to users, about failure or incomplete issue executions. It is located in Project Settings here is a preview:
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We recommend you setting up this field:
Issue Linking
Scheduler Cloud give its users an ability to create Scheduled Jobs with specified links to existing Jira issues of all types. Issue links can be added during a creation or an edition of a Scheduled Issue.
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For more of the features in regards to quick operations on existing subtasks in regards to cloning and removing it, please refer to below image:
Execution history features
As presented on a below picture, any execution status marked with red color informs about a problem and more details about it is displayed under a "Message" subtitle.
Removing The Scheduler From Your JIRA Instance
If, for some reason, you'd like to quit using The Scheduler add-on, there are two ways for you to do that:
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