Plastic, Jira Cloud, and Jira Next-Gen project integration status

[Mikael Kalms 6]

Hi,

I have been testing how well Plastic SCM's Jira integration works with Jira Cloud and Jira's Next-Gen projects.

Here is what I have so far:

* Configuring the Jira integration using the Plastic UI behaved weirdly: If I went into Preferences / Issuetrackers and configured a Jira integration and pressed OK, the configuration would be active, there would be a jira.conf file written to my harddrive, but if I opened up Preferences / Issuetrackers again I would not see the currently-active configuration in the GUI. Solution: Configure once (to get a jira.conf file), then proceed from there by modifying the jira.conf file manually.

* For Jira Cloud, the 'username / password' should be an email address / an API token.

* It is reasonably straightforward to set up Plastic SCM to be able to create branches from issues. This works fine with Next-Gen projects.

* When creating a custom field for Plastic SCM information, it is difficult to find the ID of the custom field in a Next-Gen project. I needed to talk directly to Jira's REST API to find it.

* Plastic SCM cannot write information about check-ins to Jira issues in Next-Gen projects. This is because Next-Gen projects do not yet support Text (multi-line) fields; the only text field that is available currently is Text (single-line), which is limited to max 255 chars in length; this is not sufficient for a single entry from Plastic SCM. This is the kind of error that you will see in the log if you try this:

ERROR jiraextensionrest - There was a problem putting to '/rest/api/2/issue/JIR-8': The remote server returned an error: (400) Bad Request.
ERROR jiraextensionrest - Response from the server: {"errorMessages":[],"errors":{"customfield_10105":"The entered text is too long. It exceeds the allowed limit of 255 characters."}}

* Plastic SCM can transition JIRA ticket statuses based on commit message keywords. This is easy to set up and works with Next-Gen projects.

* There are some recurring error messages in the logs, but I don't know what impact they have:

ERROR jiraextensionrest - There was a problem getting '/rest/api/2/mypreferences': The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found.
ERROR jiraextensionrest - Response from the server: {"errorMessages":["key not found: 'plastic.diffchangeset.url'"],"errors":{}}

ERROR jiraextensionrest - There was a problem getting '/rest/api/2/mypreferences': The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found.
ERROR jiraextensionrest - Response from the server: {"errorMessages":["key not found: 'plastic.formatdata'"],"errors":{}}

 

 

Another observation: In the "Create new child branch from task" dialog, the "Mark as open in issue tracker" checkbox is cleared by default, its setting is not remembered between multiple branch creations, and the Plastic admin cannot control this centrally. I'm not sure that this is the default that you want. I also suspect that the default of this setting would be useful to have in <issuetracker>.conf.

 

From here on, we will either transition to Jira Classsic projects (so that we can enable Plastic SCM to write check-in information to the issues), or we will not use the Plastic-Jira integration.

[Mikael Kalms 6]

... We just gave up on Jira's Next-Gen projects, and switched to Classic projects instead. This was due to various other features that were lacking in Next-Gen projects.

[calbzam 72]

Ok, thank you very much for the update. I was not aware of theseJira's Next-Gen projects. We will need to adapt the plugin to fix your reported issues and being fully compatible with them.

Regards,

Carlos.

[Chad Josewski 0]

Are there any updates regarding getting Plastic SCM to sync correctly with Jira Cloud?

[calbzam 72]

@Chad JosewskiWhat are the specific problems you are facing with JIRA cloud?

[Chad Josewski 0]

We are just starting with implementing Plastic with Jira Cloud and checking to see if there's any roadblocks.

How seamless is the Plastic and Jira Cloud integration?

 

 

[calbzam 72]

@Mikael Kalms reported some incompatibilites (see above for the details) but only if you are using Next-Gen projects. 

We have tons of customers using the JIRA inetgration with no more recent bug reports.

Regards,

Carlos.

[Chad Josewski 0]

After doing some testing this is a major issue for us.  Our company is dedicated to using Jira..  but will only allow us to use Next-Gen projects.  Using Classic projects is not even an option until the end of the year.
 

It would be considerably better if you wrote a plug-in for Jira to accommodate Next-Gen projects.

[calbzam 72]

Hi,

Could you open your request and details in the following link so we can properly track it?

https://plasticscm.uservoice.com/

Thanks,

Carlos.

[Chad Josewski 0]

This is a real bummer that this doesn't work.

We have new projects that have been green lit and we are not moving forward with Plastic because Plastic does not work with Jira.

 

 

 

 

[calbzam 72]

Hi,

Could you confirm the only issue is with JIRA Next-Gen projects (in JIRA cloud) and you are using the last Plastic client version? We have recently fixed some JIRA related issues and I want to be sure you are not affected by them:

 

Quote

[Bug] 9.0.16.4182
All platforms - Plastic: JIRA extension didn't list issues.
JIRA platform was unable to list issues when creating a new Plastic branch. Now it's fixed.

 

Quote

 

[Bug] (pending to release)

Issue tracker extensions - Jira: fixed connection failure for hosted Jira servers

A fix we made in 9.0.16.4182 to handle email addresses in the "User name" field for Jira Cloud unfortunately broke hosted Jira servers (for which you specify the username, not the email address). We fixed that, and both types of Jira server will now work.

 

Regards,

Carlos.

[Chad Josewski 0]

Yes... this issue is only with JIRA Next-Gen projects.

 

[Jeremy 0]

FWIW: I recently tried to integrate to Jira Cloud "next gen". The configuration's "test connection" works, but the list of tasks/issues when creating a child branch is empty. It seems like it "almost works", and the log file had some jira-related errors (see below), that may be relevant.

From the plasticscm log file:
2020-06-23 14:15:34,225 DESKTOP-0L9ID4V\jyabrow ERROR jiraextensionrest - There was a problem performing GET https://beyondview.atlassian.net/rest/api/2/user/search?username=: The remote server returned an error: (400) Bad Request.^M
2020-06-23 14:15:34,233 DESKTOP-0L9ID4V\jyabrow ERROR jiraextensionrest - Response from the server: {"errorMessages":["The username or property query parameter must be provided"],"errors":{}}^M

[calbzam 72]

Hi,

In our previous tests, there is no problem when listing the tasks from next gen JIRA projects. The problem is when you perform a cehckin in the linked branch, the information is not logged in the JIRA task because we use multiline text fields and they are not still available in next gen projects.

Are you using the API token as the password?

https://www.plasticscm.com/documentation/extensions/plastic-scm-version-control-task-and-issue-tracking-guide

Regards,

Carlos.

[Chad Josewski 0]

@calbzam  I just want to state this is a deal breaker for us.

I've liked using Plastic so far but this simply won't work for our needs.

We'll be moving to Perforce next month which has much more robust issue tracking support.

 

 

[calbzam 72]

We are at the moment solution to make it work in Plastic. Note that the main problem is nextgen projects doesn't support multi-line text fields so we cannot log the checkin information in the JIRA task. We are at the moment studying a different approach that should be ready in the following weeks.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/How-to-create-multi-line-text-field-in-next-gen-project/qaq-p/948545

Sorry for the inconveniences,

Carlos.

[Jeremy 0]

Hi Carlos,

I think understand the multi-line text field problem, and that my problem was a more basic connection issue.  We have been getting by on FogBugz without logging check-ins, partly because our team is small, but also because checkins and merges to don't necessarily mean the work is done, so we haven't seen the need to trigger SCM status changes with PlasticSCM events.  Having PlasticSCM branch names match issue id's has been enough for us.  However, since the reason we're looking at Jira is to transcend FogBugz' limitations, it could definitely be useful to have that info available in Jira.  I'll look forward to your fix for the multi-line text field to see how we can make use of checkin event info in Jira--it might be especially helpful as we expand and grow our team.

Fwiw, I was able to get around the "issues not listing" problem, by deleting the issuetrackers subdirectory in my profile, restarting PlasticSCM and re-entering the Jira connection info from scratch.  There seemed to be a weird situation where Plastic client wrote Jira connection info to a AppData\Local\plastic4\issuetrackers\mycompany@cloud\... subdir, but was reading from a legacy config in AppData\Local\plastic4\issuetrackers\mycompany@local\...  Once I cleared that out and started from scratch, Plastic was able to list the Jira issues with no problem.

[calbzam 72]

Hi,

We have already schduled the task to find a way to support JIRA nextget projects. I will keep you posted.

Regards,

Carlos.