Last updated Feb 15, 2024

Preparing for JIRA 6.2

Overview

This page is intended to be read by JIRA plugin developers to inform them of changes in JIRA 6.2 that could affect their plugins. JIRA users should consult the documentation here.

It is our goal to notify you, our plugin developers, as far in advance as possible of everything we know about that can possibly affect your plugins. Where possible, we will attach release targets.

We will update this page as the release progresses. Please watch this page or check back regularly to keep on top of the changes.

Important Note

To allow us to dedicate resources to providing the best experience on modern browsers, JIRA 6.2 (including minor releases) will be the last release that supports Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). For more information, please see this page.

About the Early Access Program

The JIRA development team release an EAP milestone every two weeks for customers and plugin developers to keep abreast of upcoming changes. These EAP releases are available on the JIRA Early Access Program Downloads page.

Summary of Changes

The risk level indicates the level of certainty we have that things will break if you are in the "Who is affected?" column and you don't make the necessary changes.

What is the change?When will this happen?*Who is affected?

Issue Status as Lozenges

6.2-OD4 (JIRA Cloud)

Plugins that output issue statuses in their UI

Risk level: low

Details: See JIRA issue statuses as lozenges for details.

Use of AMD via AlmondJS6.2-OD4 (JIRA Cloud)Plugins using RequireJS, AlmondJS or similar javascript libraries that provide define() and require() functions

Risk level: medium

Details: See Use of AMD in JIRA below.

Upgrade to AUI 5.3

6.2-OD8 (JIRA Cloud)

Plugins that provide UI

Risk level: high

Details: See Plugin upgrade -- AUI 5.3 below.

JIRA internal events6.2-OD4 (JIRA Cloud)

Risk level: low

Details: See Changes to JIRA events below.

New entity properties6.2-OD8

Risk level: N/A

Details: See Entity properties below.

Internet Explorer support6.2 finalAll plugins

Risk level: medium

Details: See Internet Explorer 11 supported in JIRA 6.2 below.

'creator' column added to 'jiraissues' table6.2 final

Risk level: low

Details: See 'creator' column added to jiraissues table below.

Source distribution -- Internal Atlassian dependencies are now Maven-based archives6.2 final

Risk level: medium

Details: See Source distribution -- Internal Atlassian dependencies are now Maven-based archives below

Detailed Explanations of Changes

In this section:

Use of AMD in JIRA

JIRA now includes AlmondJS in the superbatch, enabling use of Asynchronous Module Definitions (AMD) in JIRA's JavaScript.

When a module is defined, it cannot be redefined; The first definition will always take precedence. The consequence is that if plugins define modules with the same name as JIRA, JIRA's definitions will overwrite the plugin's definition. This may result in plugins using JIRA's versions of libraries rather than their own definitions.

JIRA defines the following AMD modules in 6.2-OD4:

  • aui
  • jquery
  • backbone
  • underscore

It is recommended that plugin developers namespace their own AMD modules to avoid any potential conflicts.

Plugin upgrade -- AUI 5.3

JIRA 6.2 will include a new version of the Atlassian User Interface library. The new version is two releases ahead from JIRA 6.1, and as such developers should review the release notes for both versions when upgrading their plugins:

We expect that the changes most likely to cause problems for plugin developers are the upgrades to external libraries:

As part of the AUI upgrade, the JIRA's footer HTML markup has changed. Plugins that provide a footer via <jira-footer> in their atlassian-plugin.xml will need to update their output to no longer include the <div class="footer-body"> wrapper around the <ul>. The <ul> should become the top level element provided by footer providers. The div.footer-body element has been replaced with a section.footer-body element, which is now provided by JIRA, rather than plugins. It's conceivable that this change may affect some CSS selectors.

Changes to JIRA events

JIRA 6.2 will include auditing -- the ability to track configuration changes done by administrators. To support this, we have enhanced and modified a number of internal events. In general, events now include more details about the action. Hence, some events have now different constructors (the previous ones were removed). These are not API breaking changes, although they may be perceived to be so. These constructors were only meant to be used internally, but they were never marked as internal. Starting with JIRA 6.2, they will now include a proper @Internal annotation. Here is the list of events that will change (if for any reason you created those events in your code, please contact us):

  • AbstractCustomFieldEvent
  • CustomFieldUpdatedEvent
  • DraftWorkflowPublishedEvent
  • NotificationDeletedEvent
  • NotificationSchemeDeletedEvent
  • PermissionDeletedEvent
  • PermissionSchemeDeletedEvent
  • WorkflowSchemeAddedToProjectEvent
  • WorkflowSchemeDeletedEvent
  • WorkflowUpdatedEvent

We do not expect a lot of people to have used these constructors, but in case you have used them in your plugin, please let us know: contact bartek (at) atlassian (dot) com or leave a comment under this page.

Internet Explorer 11 supported in JIRA 6.2

We are planning on supporting Internet Explorer 11 for JIRA Cloud and downloadable JIRA. We have scheduled this for the final production release of downloadable JIRA 6.2. Please ensure that your plugin is compatible with Internet Explorer 11, if you want it to work with JIRA 6.2 or JIRA Cloud.

'creator' column added to jiraissues table

A new creator field was introduced in JIRA 6.2 EAP 6 m6 and will be included in the final JIRA 6.2 production release. This field was implemented as a column in the jiraissues table in the JIRA database. Please note the following:

  • New JIRA 6.2 instances: the creator field will be located after the assignee column
  • Existing JIRA instances that are upgraded to 6.2: the creator field will be inserted as the last column in jiraissues table

We strongly recommend that you do not rely on the order of columns in the tables of the JIRA database, but instead refer to the columns explicitly by name.

Entity properties

JIRA 6.2 will include a new feature allowing add-ons to add key/value stores to JIRA entities, such as issues or projects. These values are indexed by JIRA and can be queried via a REST API or (in some cases) through JQL. More details are provided on the Index Document Configuration Plugin Module page as well as in the JIRA REST API documentation.

Source distribution -- Internal Atlassian dependencies are now Maven-based archives

JIRA's source distribution includes the source of the internal Atlassian projects that JIRA depends on (e.g. atlassian-bonnie, atlassian-core, etc.). From this release onwards, these internal Atlassian dependencies for JIRA's source distribution are now Maven-based archives, rather than exports of the source repository for each dependency. There will be a Maven-based archive for each dependency, named <dependencyname-version>-sources.jar. To provide us with feedback, please raise a ticket at https://jira.atlassian.com.

Please note the following:

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