JIRA 4.3 RC1 Release Notes

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18 February 2011

JIRA 4.3 RC1 (a.k.a 4.3 milestone 7 or 'm7') is a public development release leading up to JIRA 4.3. A Release Candidate (RC) is a preliminary release leading up to the official release of a JIRA version. RC releases are a fairly stable snapshot of our work in progress and provide an advance preview of new features to the general public. JIRA plugin developers can also use RC releases to test and fix their plugins in advance of an official release. For all production use and testing of JIRA, please use the latest official release.

The Atlassian team is proud to bring you the JIRA 4.3 RC1 release. As always, we would love to hear your feedback and comments about this release. To keep the discussion centralised, please provide your feedback as a comment on JRA-23131.

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 RC1 includes Unified Application Links (UAL), Gadgets 2.0, and the Atlassian Plugin Framework version 2.6. Also please see the Plugin Developer Notes for JIRA 4.3, plus note that the REST API continues to evolve — please watch the Developer blog for the latest news on the REST API.

Highlights of JIRA 4.3 RC1:

 

Thank you for your interest in JIRA 4.3 RC1
Download RC

Upgrading to JIRA 4.3 RC1

JIRA RC releases are available here. When upgrading, please follow the JIRA 4.3 Upgrade Guide.

Do not use in production

RC releases should not be used in production environments as they are not officially supported.

Please also note:

  • RC releases may not be safe — RC releases are snapshots of the ongoing JIRA development process. As such:
    • While we deem these releases to be fairly stable, they have not undergone sufficient testing to be deemed an official (final) release.
    • While feature development work is complete, some features may be subject to change or may be removed before the next full release.
  • No upgrade path — Because RC releases still represent work in progress, we cannot provide a supported upgrade path between RC releases, from EAP or Beta to RC releases, or from any RC to the eventual final release. Thus, any data you store in a JIRA RC release may not be able to be migrated to a future JIRA release.

Highlights of JIRA 4.3 RC1

 

Full integration with LDAP and Active Directory

The way users and groups are stored and accessed in JIRA has been totally rewritten in Release 4.3, giving you the ability to connect to an LDAP server — including Microsoft Active Directory — for all user information. Your options include:

Integrate JIRA with LDAP/Active Directory

Update your user details in either JIRA or LDAP/Active Directory and they will automatically populate to the other repository:

Use LDAP for authentication only

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).

Connect to a Crowd server for user management

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:

  • Simple and quick setup via the JIRA and Crowd administration consoles.
  • Clever synchronisation and caching to ensure the best response times.
  • More...

Use multiple LDAP and/or Crowd servers simultaneously

If you have multiple directories, you can now simply connect JIRA to all of them.

Connect Confluence to your JIRA User Directory

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.

Confluence 3.5 can connect directly to JIRA 4.3 via the administration UI. 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.

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Easy management of User Directories via JIRA Admin UI

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:

  • Choose from a list of supported directory types, including Microsoft Active Directory and ten other popular LDAP schemas.
  • Configure all your LDAP settings via the JIRA Administration interface: permissions, server and schema settings. We pre-populate the fields with default values depending on your choice of directory type.
  • Choose the LDAP permissions to suit your needs: read/write, read only, local groups or authentication only.
  • Make use of the caching and copy-as-required configurations to optimise the performance of your LDAP searches.
  • Add as many directory servers as you need. Connect directory servers of different types, including the JIRA internal directory (default), LDAP, Crowd and/or another JIRA server.
  • Turn on support for nested groups.
  • Configure your LDAP connection pool.

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New Plugin Management System

JIRA 4.3 includes the Universal Plugin Manager (UPM), which provides you with a simple way of adding and managing plugins:

  • Auto-discovery of available plugins (see Featured Plugins in the screenshot below)
  • Point-and-click installation — you no longer need to download JAR files and shut down JIRA to install them.

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Application Links: Connecting Applications Together

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. You can even choose to associate individual entities (i.e. JIRA projects, Confluence spaces, FishEye repositories, FishEye projects, Crucible projects, Bamboo projects) with each other. Applications Links is bundled with Fisheye 2.4, Confluence 3.5, Jira 4.3, and all later versions of those applications. In addition, Bamboo 3.1 is compatible with AppLinks. You can configure Jira-to-Bamboo links via the Jira administration screens.

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 also can associate entities of two linked applications. For example, you could associate a JIRA project with a Confluence space. This allows you to take advantage of additional integration features like link rendering, which lets you create links to issues or pages in the project or space using a simple textual reference, e.g. [JRA-1234], [myConfluenceSpace:Test Page].

  • In JIRA 4.3 there is now a 'Configure Application Links' option on the 'Project' management screen, enabling you to easily configure application links for a given project.

For more about configuring Application Links, please see the Application Links Administrator's Guide.

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Add another application's Gadgets to your JIRA Gadget Directory

JIRA 4.3 includes Atlassian Gadgets 2.0, allowing 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:

In the JIRA Gadget Directory , you can now click 'Gadget Subscriptions'. There you can provide the URL for the other application (or other JIRA instance), and all the gadgets from that instance will be added to your JIRA Gadget Directory.

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Improved Importer (new since Beta 1)

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:

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Dashboard Performance Improvements

We are extremely pleased to announce that you should see a noticeable reduction in the time it takes to load a Dashboard.

  • On average, dashboard performance has improved by 29%
  • For large dashboards, the performance improvement is 35%

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).

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JQL and Quick Search Enhancements

JIRA 4.3 incorporates several JQL and Quick Search enhancements. You can now:

Search the Change History with JQL 'WAS' Operator

JIRA 4.3 introduces the ability to search the Change History of issues. There is much more functionality to follow, but in this release you can search for changes to the Status field.

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")

Search for relative dates and versions with JQL 'startOfDay', 'endOfDay', 'earliestUnreleasedVersion', 'latestReleasedVersion' (new since Beta 1)

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)

Use a wild card when searching the 'Fix Version' field with Quick Search

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:

  • 3.2
  • 3.2-beta
  • 3.2.1
  • 3.2.x

Use the r: prefix with Quick Search to find issues reported by a specific user

With 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.

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Revamped User Avatars

JIRA 4.3 introduces the new-look Atlassian avatars:

  • User avatars are displayed as the icon for your profile, and to illustrate your comments on an issue. See the documentation on Adding a User Avatar.

We were fond of the old avatars, but think you'll agree they were looking a little dated by comparison:

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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

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Remembered Assignees

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.

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'Whitelist' for External URLs (new since Beta 1)

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.

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Mail Server Configuration Improvements

In JIRA 4.3, administrators can now test their mail server configuration with the "Test Connection" button.

A 'Timeout' field has also been added.

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Security Enhancements

For enhanced security:

User Email Change is now Password Protected

Users will now be prompted to enter their password when changing their email address.

JIRA provides Secure Administration Sessions (new since Beta 1)

Access to JIRA's administration features and functions is now password-protected.

See the documentation for more details.

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JIRA now supports 'In-place Database Upgrades'

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.

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Support Tools Plugin now bundled (new since Beta 1)

We are very pleased to announce that the Atlassian Support Tools Plugin is now bundled with JIRA. The Atlassian Support Tools Plugin proves tools to help you troubleshoot issues with Atlassian products and get help from Atlassian Support.

See the documentation for more details.

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Support for Chrome and Safari 5 Browsers

We are very pleased to announce that Chrome and Safari 5 are supported for use with JIRA 4.3.

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REST API Improvements

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.

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Other Enhancements and Fixes

For the list of issues resolved in JIRA 4.3 so far, click here.

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Last modified on Jul 8, 2013

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