JIRA Software 7.7.x upgrade notes

Here are some important notes on upgrading to JIRA Software 7.7. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, see the JIRA Software 7.7 release notes. 

Upgrade notes

JIRA administrators

Upgrade to the DVCS plugin

If your Jira Software Server or Data Center instance is connected to Bitbucket Cloud, it’s through the Jira DVCS connector plugin.

Due to GDPR regulations and the personal data protection they require, we've needed to make some changes to the API's that Bitbucket Cloud has available. These changes happen in two phases. Phase one will be live on Bitbucket Cloud by the 10th of May, 2019, and Phase two will go live on the 1st of September, 2019.

What you need to do as a result is to upgrade your Jira Software instance or upgrade your Jira DVCS connector plugin to the relevant version. For more information, see Jira KB. 

Oracle JDBC driver no longer bundled with JIRA

If you're using Oracle as the database, you'll need to download the driver from the Oracle website, and copy it to the /lib directory in the JIRA installation directory after the upgrade. 

The supported Oracle JDBC version is 12.2.0.1. For more info, see Connecting JIRA applications to Oracle.

If you’re upgrading JIRA Data Center with ZDU (zero downtime upgrades), copy the driver to your nodes before starting the upgraded JIRA instances. Starting JIRA without the new driver will result in an error until you replace the driver and restart.

Fix: Duplicated job IDs

In this release, we’ve delivered a fix to solve the problem with duplicated job IDs. You can read more about the related bug here: JRASERVER-64325 - Getting issue details... STATUS

How does the fix work?

When finalizing the upgrade, an upgrade task removes the duplicates from the database (clusteredjob table), and then recreates the whole clusteredjob_jobid_idx index, also adding a UNIQUE keyword to it. This removes the duplicates and prevents them from being created again.

Known issue

The fix will work for most environments, but we did encounter an issue on one of our test machines. The problem appears when a new duplicate is created after we remove the duplicates, but before we recreate the index. In other words—before we block the duplicates from being created. Such a duplicate would stop the index from being recreated.

Solution

If the index is not recreated, it won’t stop the upgrade or affect your work in a significant way (might degrade performance). We recommend, however, that you apply the following solution to recreate the index.

• Check that the clusteredjob_jobid_idx index exists in your database.
   If it's there, you're good to go. The index was properly recreated.
   If it's not there, restart your JIRA instance (Server), or one of the nodes (Data Center). After the restart, the index will be recreated.

Plugin developers

Asynchronous Module Definition

The JIRA development team has started converting the JIRA code to AMD (Asynchronous Module Definition) to be able to use modules and their dependencies, and to improve the code quality in general. We’ve converted only some parts of the code, and no actions are required from you. This is just a heads up about our plans—eventually, we want to completely switch to AMD, in which case we’ll drop support for global variables.

We will be informing you about the progress in this area with each release. Despite the recent code changes, we’ve kept the backward compatibility, so you can develop your plugins the way you used to.

If you encounter a JIRA page that still uses global variables (for objects that are provided as AMD modules), you’ll see a warning in the developer console saying that a global variable is deprecated and you should use an AMD module instead. You can either use the module, or stick to the global variable for now.

Retrieving the details of temporary attachments

We’ve added the streamTemporaryAttachmentContent method that lets you retrieve the binary content of temporary attachments, i.e. attachments added to issues, but not yet saved. For more information about using this method, see JIRA 7.7.0 API.

Upgrade procedure

Note: Upgrade to a test environment first. Test your upgrades in your test environment before rolling them into production.

If you're already running a version of JIRA, please follow these instructions to upgrade to the latest version:

1. Before you upgrade, we strongly recommend that you back up your installation directory, home directory, and database.
2. Read the release notes and upgrade notes for all releases between your version and the latest version.
3. Download the latest version of JIRA.
4. Follow the instructions in the Upgrade Guide.

Upgrading from earlier versions?

• 7.0, or later
  Take a look at the upgrade matrix. It lists known issues you should be aware of when upgrading between multiple versions.
• Earlier than 7.0
  Consult the Migration hub. The JIRA 7.0 release introduced significant changes. You must first upgrade to JIRA 7.0 (we always recommend the latest bugfix release, in this case 7.0.11) before upgrading to later versions.