Documentation for JIRA 4.3. Documentation for other versions of JIRA is available too.
16 March, 2011
The Atlassian JIRA team is proud to bring you a brand new version of one of the world's favourite issue-trackers.
Identity management comes of age in JIRA 4.3, with complete LDAP integration. JIRA 4.3 also includes the Universal Plugin Manager for easier management of plugins, and a new data importer for easier migration from your old systems. Additionally, a raft of new JQL functions give you many powerful new searching options, such as the ability to search an issue's change history.
Dashboard Publish/Subscribe with Confluence (i.e. Gadgets 2.0) is also included, so if you are using Confluence as well as JIRA, your Confluence gadgets will now appear in the JIRA Gadget Directory.
Note to developers: JIRA 4.3 includes Unified Application Links (UAL) 3.2, Gadgets 2.0, and the Atlassian Plugin Framework version 2.6.
Upgrading to JIRA 4.3 is free for all customers with active JIRA software maintenance as of March 15, 2011.
Upgrading to JIRA 4.3
JIRA 4.3 can be downloaded from the JIRA Download Center. Before upgrading, please refer to the JIRA 4.3 Upgrade Guide.
The way users and groups are stored and accessed in JIRA has been totally rewritten in this release, giving you the ability to connect to an LDAP server — including Microsoft Active Directory — for all user information. Your options include:
Update your user details in either JIRA or LDAP/Active Directory and they will automatically populate to the other repository:
This was the old way of integrating JIRA with LDAP, prior to JIRA 4.3. You can still do this, but much more easily (see below).
For larger and more complex installations, you may need to install Atlassian Crowd for user management and single sign-on. (See our guide to limitations and recommendations.) When integrating earlier versions of JIRA and Crowd, you had to manually edit a number of configuration files. JIRA 4.3 offers the following new features:
If you have multiple directories, you can now simply connect JIRA to all of them.
JIRA 4.3 can act as the directory manager for your Confluence site, interacting with one or more user directories and ensuring that you have the same set of users and groups across both applications.
The Confluence 3.5 administration UI can connect directly to JIRA 4.3. Clever synchronisation and caching ensure the best response times for your directory searches.
Earlier versions of Confluence can continue to use a direct JDBC connection to JIRA 4.2 and earlier.
In JIRA 4.3, administrators can now manage external User Directories directly from the JIRA Administration screens. Gone are the days of manually editing XML files.
JIRA 4.3 brings a simple, powerful and flexible directory management interface:
JIRA 4.3 includes the Universal Plugin Manager (UPM), which provides you with a simple way of adding and managing plugins:
JIRA 4.3 includes Atlassian Gadgets 2.0 with Gadget Subscriptions. This allows you to quickly add all gadgets from your Confluence, Bamboo, FishEye or Crucible instance — or from another JIRA instance — to your JIRA Gadget Directory, for easy addition to your JIRA dashboard:
JIRA 4.3 provides a greatly improved Importer for Bugzilla, Mantis, FogBugz and CSV files, by bundling the JIRA Importers Plugin.
The web-based import wizard makes it easy to map fields — and individual field values — from your old bug-tracker to your new JIRA system:
We are extremely pleased to announce that you should see a noticeable reduction in the time it takes to load a Dashboard.
We are also extremely pleased to announce that you should see a noticeable reduction in the time it takes to load the Gadget Directory (depending on how many external gadgets you have configured).
JIRA 4.3 now officially supports 'in-place database upgrades', when upgrading from JIRA 4.0.0 or later.
This method requires much less downtime during the JIRA upgrade process, especially if you operate a large JIRA installation. You no longer need to export your existing JIRA data to an XML backup and then restore this data into your new JIRA version. Instead, we now support simply 'pointing' your new version of JIRA at your existing JIRA database!
See the documentation for more details.
JIRA 4.3 incorporates new several functions and operators. You can now:
JIRA 4.3 introduces the ability to search the Change History of issues. In this release you can search for changes to the Status field, and there's much more functionality to come in future releases.
For example, the following will return all issues that currently have, or previously had, a status of 'In Progress':
status WAS "In Progress"
The WAS
operator can be used with the NOT
, IN
and NOT IN
operators, e.g. to find issues that have never had a status of 'In Progress' or 'Resolved':
status WAS NOT IN ("In Progress","Resolved")
JIRA 4.3 introduces the ability to search for issues relative to the current day, month, week or year. For example, to find issues that have been created today:
created > startOfDay()
Or to find issues that are due by the end of this month:
due < endOfMonth()
You can also perform searches based on the earliest unreleased version (i.e. the next version that is due to be released) of a specified project:
earliestUnreleasedVersion(project)
Or on the most recently released version of a specified project:
latestReleasedVersion(project)
JIRA 4.3 incorporates several enhancements to Quick Search. You can now:
When using Quick Search, you can now use the wildcard symbol: "*
" to find issues that matches a core part of a Fix Version. For example, "ff:3.2*
" will match any issue whose Fix For Version is:
r:
prefix with Quick Search to find issues reported by a specific userWith Quick Search, you can find issues reported by you, another user or with no reporter, using the prefix "r:
" followed by a specific reporter term such as "me
", a username or "none
", such that:
r:me
" — finds issues reported by you.r:samuel
" — finds issues reported by the user whose username is "samuel".r:none
" — finds issues with no reporter.
JIRA 4.3 introduces the new-look Atlassian avatars:
We were fond of the old avatars, but think you'll agree they were looking a little dated by comparison:
The 'Linked Issues' section of the 'View Issue' screen has been streamlined to make it both more compact and quicker to use. You can now delete links directly from this screen upon mouse hover:
JIRA 4.3: a linked issue
Previously, to delete a link you needed to click the 'cog' icon (which took you to a separate screen):
JIRA 4.2: a linked issue
JIRA now makes it easier to assign users to issues. The top of the assignee dropdown list shows the last five people you assigned issues to, as well as the reporter of the issue and all participants involved in the issue.
In JIRA 4.3, administrators can now test their mail server configuration with the "Test Connection" button.
A "Timeout" field has also been added.
For enhanced security:
For security reasons, an administrator may wish to limit the URLs from which users can source content that is displayed on their JIRA site (e.g. via an External Gadget).
JIRA 4.3 allows you to create a 'Whitelist' of URLs — or URL patterns — whose content you wish to make available to users of your JIRA site:
See the documentation for more details.
Users will now be prompted to enter their password when changing their email address.
Access to JIRA's administration features and functions is now password-protected.
See the documentation for more details.
We are very pleased to announce that the Atlassian Support Tools Plugin is now bundled with JIRA. The Atlassian Support Tools Plugin provides tools to help you troubleshoot issues with Atlassian products and get help from Atlassian Support.
See the documentation for more details.
JIRA 4.3 includes Application Links, which makes it easy to connect your Atlassian applications together.
Application Links allows you to link your JIRA, Confluence, FishEye, Crucible, Bamboo and Subversion applications.
Linking two applications allows you to share information and access one application's functions from within the other. For example, if you linked a Confluence server to a JIRA server, you can create, find and insert JIRA issues directly onto a Confluence page or blog post using the new 'Insert JIRA Issue' option in Confluence 3.5.
You can even choose to associate your JIRA project with the 'entities' of other Atlassian applications (i.e. Confluence spaces, FishEye repositories or projects, Crucible projects, Bamboo projects, or other JIRA projects). The 'Configure Application Links' option on your JIRA project configuration screen, allows you to easily associate your JIRA project with these entities.
Applications Links is bundled with JIRA 4.3, Confluence 3.5 and FishEye 2.4.
See the documentation for more details.
We are very pleased to announce that Chrome and Safari 5 are supported for use with JIRA 4.3.
We have improved discoverability of issues and projects through the REST API: there is now a search
resource, which can be used to search for issues using JIRA Query Language (JQL). It is also possible to obtain a list of projects in a JIRA instance. Have a look at the reference documentation to see if the REST API offers the features that you want (let us know if not).
Clients that log in through the REST API can now determine when the login has been denied due to a CAPTCHA requirement: the HTTP header X-Authentication-Denied-Reason
has all the necessary information.
For the list of issues resolved in JIRA 4.3 so far, click here.