The Scheduler for JIRA Cloud

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 the issue you want to be created. 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).

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.

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" rather 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

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 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 the JIRA standard and custom fields (except the "Attachment" field). However, it is not possible for us to support any third-party custom field (the ones defined by another add-ons). 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 definition section, where you can define how often your Scheduled Issue should be created. There are three trigger types to choose from: Manual, Simple and Advanced.

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.

Both Simple and Advanced trigger types are actually quite similar to each other, in terms that both of them allows you to actually 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.

Managing Scheduled Issues

Scheduled Issues are managed can be managed using "Scheduled Issues" tab panel on each project view. [screen]

The table here contains each Scheduled Issue that belongs to this particular project. If the table is empty, you can create new Scheduled Issue using the "Create" button. The table provides some important information about each Scheduled Issue, such as:

• Name - a project-unique name of the Scheduled Issue
• Description - an optional description you can add to your Scheduled Issue to describe it in more details
• Status - the state of the Scheduled Issue. States are described in more details here
• Trigger - the trigger definition of the Scheduled Issue

For your convenience, you can easily filter the table using the "Filter" input above the table. All the described columns are supported, which means you can easily filter your Scheduled Issues by name, state, or even by trigger.

The "Trigger" column shows the Trigger Definition in form of a Quartz cron expression. You can hover your mouse over the cron statement to see the user-friendly description of the trigger. [screen]

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:

• Execution history - displays the execution history for this particular Scheduled Issue, along with the issues is created,
• Execute - manually executes the Scheduled Issue,
• Clone - creates a full copy of this Scheduled Issue,
• Activate / Inactivate - allows to quickly change Scheduled Issue status,
• Edit - allows you to edit the Scheduled Issue,
• Remove - permanently removes 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.

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:

• disable the add-on, or
• uninstall the add-on

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, like execution history etc) will be removed permanently.

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

Data Privacy Statement

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Frequently Asked Questions

FAQ can be found here