Jira IssueFilter macro access requirements for customers of a service management portal

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Platform notice: Server and Data Center only. This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Server and Data Center platforms.

Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.

*Except Fisheye and Crucible

    

Summary

When an agent of the service management server accesses the confluence page it works as intended displaying a list of requests. However, if a user who is a customer of the service management portal, accesses the confluence page they get an error in the macro:

Data cannot be retrieved due to an unexpected error.

Environment

  • Confluence 7.13.1


Diagnosis

  • A customer user account can search for the KB.
  • A customer can view the Knowledge Base article in the Service Desk customer portal.
  • A customer can't view Jira issue macro data and getting a warning message due to permission reason.
  • A Jira user agent is able to search/view and sees the Jira issue macro from the Knowledge Base article.

Cause


By default, if a user using an unlicensed user account (Jira service desk customer) would not able to see the Jira Issue Macro data due to the JQL filter permission restricted to only logged-in Jira user account to see the JQL. You can inspect the JQL filter by requesting the customer to click on the View these issues in Jira link and verify if its accessible. This seems to be the expected behavior while using the Jira Issue Macro. As mentioned in the Jira Issue Macro documentation here: Jira Issues Macro:

Before you can use this macro, your Confluence and Jira application must be connected via Application Links. People viewing the page will see the publicly accessible issues from the Jira site. If your Jira site has restricted viewing (that is, people need permission to view issues) then they will need to authenticate before seeing the restricted issues.

Therefore, your customers will need to have the necessary permission to view Jira issues. You can restrict the privileges on your project by adding your customers to "Browse Project" permission which in turn needs a Jira license.

We already have a feature request registered with our Product Development requesting for this functionality.


Solution


Option 1: Allow anonymous user to access the Jira project or filter

Set the Jira instance as public and browsable by everyone so anonymous access is enabled and Confluence can reach Jira to bring the issues and the customers can view them using the Jira Issues Macro.

You can make a project public for anonymous viewing, so people without a Jira account can still view the different issues. Just by adding the group "Anyone" to the permission Browse project in your permission scheme.

(info) If the group "Anyone" has Browse Project permission on your project you don't need a Jira user account to see the issues. (They won't be able to edit or comment on them)

(warning) Please test it in staging before implementing in production if your Jira instance is accessible to the public.


Option 2: Have Jira in private but create a account for your customer (consume Jira license)

Have Jira as private, and have Confluence users (Your Customers) also have a Jira account and permissions to view that issue. You can then create a group (For your customers) and provide them "Browse Project" permission on the required project. This way they can see the issues but they won't be able to edit or comment on them.




Last modified on Jul 7, 2022

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