Please Note: JIRA 4.1+ now uses form tokens as an additional level of security against cross-site request forgery. See Form Token Handling for details on how your external HTML form will handle form tokens.

If you would like for your users to create issues from another site, you can do so by putting links to your JIRA application's create issue page. You can also populate the fields on the page with values to select the project, the issue type, or even the summary of the issue. This document will detail how to construct these links and how to populate the fields. This feature is available from JIRA 3.5 onwards.

How to construct the link

The most basic HTML link to create issues has the following structure:

<a href="[JIRA BASE URL]/secure/CreateIssueDetails!init.jspa?[ARGUMENTS]">[DESCRIPTION]</a>

where

JIRA Base URL

This Base URL is the same as the JIRA Base URL you wish to create issues in. This can be found in Jira Admin > System > General Configuration > Settings. For example, http://jira.atlassian.com is the base URL of the JIRA application running at Atlassian.

The Arguments

The list of key-value pairs included will define which fields will have what values set. The argument list has the following properties:

• Each key-value pair is separated by an '&'
  • For Example: '[keyValuePair]&[keyValuePair]&[keyValuePair]'...
    
    
• Each key-value pair has the form 'key=value' where the key is a field name and the value is the desired value to be set for its corresponding field
  • For Example: 'pid=10420&issuetype=1&summary=helloWorld&description=greetings'...
    
    
• The list must comply with HTML link syntax, meaning that all characters must be properly escaped.
  • Characters like space cannot be used directly, they must be encoded (escaped). To use a space, we would replace the space with a '+' or '%20' which is the space equivalent.
    An excellent HTML URL-encoding reference listing all the characters and their corresponding encoded symbol can be found here.
  • For Example: 'summary=This+is+a+summary%20with%20escaped+spaces'

 
As you can see, constructing the argument list is relatively simple. All we need is the name of the fields we want to set values for, and just structure it as above.

Finding out the field names and their values

Now that we know how to construct the URL structure for direct issue creation, we need to know how to identify the IDs to be added to it.

The easiest way to achieve this is by creating a "base issue", that is set with all of the values you want to use on the HTML link, and then view the values stored on the JSON representation of the issue by accessing the following REST endpoint:

https://<yourinstanceurl>/rest/api/2/issue/<issuekey>?expand=names

 A few helpful notes:

• Be sure to replace '<yourinstanceurl>' and '<issuekey>' with your instance base URL and the "base issue" respectively.
• If your URL contains a context path, be sure to also add it to the URL.
• To facilitate the visualization of the data, you can download an extension to beautify your JSON results. We use JSONView extension for Chrome.

 
Example of how the REST results look like:
Here, the 'issuetype' ID would be '10002', and the project 'pid' would be '10100'.

 Since we've added the '?expand=names' parameter to the URL, we get a helpful translation between the system name for the field and the name that is displayed on the UI at the bottom of the page.

The following table shows a sample list of the standard JIRA fields with their name (key), the type of value expected, and an example of the value:

Examples

Here are some simple examples that provide links to create issues in a JIRA project.

To create an improvement issue in the Test project, click
<a href="http://jira.atlassian.com/secure/CreateIssueDetails!init.jspa?pid=10420&issuetype=4">here</a>

To create a task with summary 'say hello world', click
<a href="http://jira.atlassian.com/secure/CreateIssueDetails!init.jspa?pid=10420&issuetype=3&summary=say+hello+world">here</a>

To create a task with multiple values selected for a field, click
<a href="http://jira.atlassian.com/secure/CreateIssueDetails!init.jspa?pid=10420&issuetype=3&summary=say+hello+world&fixVersions=10331&fixVersions=13187">here</a>