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):

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:

Using the "Create" button in Scheduled Issues tab panel
Using "Schedule issue" item from the Issue "More" menu
Using "Clone" item from the Scheduled issue action menu

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.

The first page of the wizard prompts you for the Scheduled Issue attributes, such as Name and Description. Name attribute is required, and it has to be unique within each project (so that each Scheduled Issue can be easily distinguished from the other). The wizard will notify you if the name you have chosen is already taken.

The second page allows you to define the Issue Template. In the top section, you choose the issue type you want to create. Once you do that, the bottom section will display the fields that are used by the chosen issue type for you to fill up. The required fields are marked with the "*" and the wizard will not let you through if you leave them empty. Currently, we support all of the JIRA standard and custom fields (except the "Attachment" field). Please be advised that it is not possible for us to support any third-party custom field(s), defined by another add-on(s). If you need a particular third-party custom field support, please raise a ticket and we'll see if it's possible for us to handle it.

The third page is the Trigger details section, where you can define how often your Scheduled Issue should be created. There are three trigger types to choose from: Cron, Interval and Manual.

Choosing Manual trigger type will let you create a Scheduled Issue without a Trigger. As described in "Manual Scheduled Issues" section, The Scheduler will not attempt to create this issue periodically, but instead, such a Scheduled Issue can be manually executed with "Execute" action.

Cron and Interval trigger types are actually quite similar, in a way that both of them allow you to define a trigger.

Simple trigger type lets you define a trigger with a user-friendly period picker, whereas "Advanced" allows you to provide your own Quartz cron expression. The "Simple" picker contains a number of options that should be sufficient for most of the use cases. However, should you need a truly custom trigger, the "Advanced" type is here to help.

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:

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),
Issue Preview - displays an issue details for the Scheduled Issue,
Execution History - displays an execution history for a particular Scheduled Issue, along with the information about the Jira issue creation date,
Activate / Deactivate - allows to quickly change Scheduled Issue status,
Clone - creates a full copy of this Scheduled Issue,
Edit triggers - allows you to quick edit triggers on Scheduled Issue, without going throught whole wizard window,
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.

This is also true for add-on like The Scheduler. Imagine that you've been using JIRA & The Scheduler for quite some time, you've set up a couple of Scheduled Issues and they were working as expected without any problems. Then, at some point, you decided that you want the "Component" field to be mandatory for all the issue types. You make the required change in JIRA configuration, but you've noticed that for some reason The Scheduler stopped creating the issues for you. The reason for that is because of such a configuration change, The Scheduler is no longer capable of creating the issues that do not have any component specified in their Issue Template.

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:

Please note that to perform the below actions you must be granted with Project Admin rights.

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:

You can set up notifications for:

"Incomplete Issue Execution" - it would send an email when issue execution was interrupted and the whole job is not don e.g. 2 out of 4 sub-task were created.

"Failed Issue Execution" - this notification would be sent if at the planned time is is not created for some reason.

In both of this Notifications you can set up a recipient, it could be related to the Failed Scheduled Issue details - you can send message to Reporter or Assignee (Explicit Assignee - currently it won't work for Automatic Assignee) or you can send a message to some custom email address.

If something goes wrong and failure message can not be delivered to any of configured Recipients, there is an option to set a Fallback Recipient. For this recipient you can choose from your Jira users or add a custom email address.

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.

To do so, on a second step of the Scheduled Issue wizard please scroll down and follow action as presented on example below:

After doing so, proceed to the next step by pressing "Next" and on the final stage press "Create" (or "Update" in case of an edition).

Be advised that you should remove on this step, any linked issue that was earlier deleted in Jira, otherwise when you try to execute it manually, or if it'll be done by trigger, then you can expect "Incomplete" error to appear on a SI table:

After accessing "Execution History" of a scheduled issue with such status, you will be able to spot that "incomplete" is only relevant to deleted issues - it doesn't affect creation of new issues, linked to a still existing ones in Jira. In other words - it's just a warning that it's impossible to create linking with an issue that is not present in Jira any longer.

As for the sub-tasks - any issue placed in 'Scheduled Issues" table without "inactive" status, can be managed with sub-task linking. To do do, simply click "Add subtasks+" button placed next to “Name”:

A new prompt with all necessary information will be presented:

After clicking "Add Subtask" button next screen will load, with a linking option appears. On top of it you must provide a "subtask name", then scroll down and follow below presented information:

After pressing "Submit" new linked sub-task will be created and "No subtasks created" information will disappear.

After submitting recently edited one, "Add Subtask" button will become active again, allowing you to create more dedicated subtasks (up to 5 max.), each with unique name, linked issues and fields to fill in.

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.

You can access execution history in two different ways: by going to action menu (1) and pressing Execution history (2)

Execution history for one selected scheduled issue

You can access it for multiple Scheduled Issues at the same time by checking it (3) and then pressing Execution History (4)

Execution history for more then one scheduled issue

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:

It is important to understand the difference between these two approaches. When you disable the add-on, you will no longer see The Scheduler in your JIRA, and all your Scheduled Issues will be paused, but they will not be deleted. This is the recommended approach if you consider coming back to using The Scheduler in the future and you want to keep your Scheduled Issues - when you re-enable the add-on, all your Scheduled Issues will be resumed again.

If, however, you'd like to remove The Scheduler add-on and remove all your data, then simply uninstall the add-on using the "Manage add-ons" administration section. Keep in mind that all your Scheduled Issues (and any other data, i.e.execution history) will be removed permanently.

Last, but not least, regardless of which option you chose, please send us some feedback so that we could improve.

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