Could We Link JIRA Tickets to Community Topics?

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#1

This topic in the Support category inspired me to look into whether it is possible to link Jira tickets to Community topics. Specifically, whether it is possible for Jira to push a notification about a change in a particular ticket’s status to a particular Community topic. This would keep a Community user apprised on Project work being done to resolve an issue they’re interested in.

I did a bit of searching, and it seems possible to set up webhooks in JIRA that could do this, but I quickly got out of my depth in the descriptions. Does anyone have any experience with this kind of thing, and could comment on this thread re. feasibility, potential pitfalls, etc.?

I couldn’t find any examples of other people wanting this kind of Jira-to-Discourse connection, but there are examples of Discourse -to-Jira connections to enable the instantiation of Jira tickets from a Discourse topic (like this example). Our case of going from Jira to Discourse might have the same implementation solution as those examples (unsure). There are also third-party companies like Zapier that seem to enable this kind of integration, but at a cost – maybe worth it though.

Thoughts?

#2

I believe this is technically possible using Jira webhooks and the Discourse API, but it will require some development of a micro-service plus some design work to figure out how to specify (or find) which topics are associated with which Jira issues.

Most Zapier (and similar) integrations take information from non-Jira systems and use it to create Jira issues. Going the other way is rarer.

There are usually relatively easy ways to observe a few attributes of a Jira issue such as the status and title (e.g. as a “badge”), but not ongoing comments.

#3

Somehow my view of the Zapier link didn’t properly show me the full extent of the integration; I see now that it indeed does do issue-to-post. It’s not clear to me from that page alone how configurable it is, though.