Listeners

Listener Interfaces

JIRA has the following concrete Listeners (which extend the base JiraListener interface):

Example Listeners

The examples provided may be freely used and modified for use in your own environment. The source of all examples is available and should give you good overview of how simple it is to write your own listeners. Both example listeners are included with JIRA 2.1, and both implement UserEventListener and IssueEventListener.

• DebugListener (source) — This is a very simple listener that prints events and their content to System.out whenever they are received. To test this listener, add a listener with the class com.atlassian.jira.event.listeners.DebugListener .
• MailListener (source) — This listener is how mail notifications are currently sent from within JIRA, and a good example of a more complex listener. It basically listens for events, and turns them into email notifications using Velocity templates to generate the mail bodies.
  This listener is usually always turned on in JIRA — see Email Notifications for more details. If you want to write more complex or more specific notifications, you can disable the internal MailListener and add your own.

Other examples of useful tasks that can be accomplished with listeners are:

• Send SMS or IM notifications — A listener could easily send notifications for various events via SMS or instant messenger (e.g. ICQ or AIM) - or anywhere that you have a Java library to send messages.
• Group notifications — A listener could notify certain groups of issue changes, depending on the content of the issue. For example any issue containing "windows" in the environment could notify your "windows-developers" group.

Registering a Listener

For custom-written listener classes, make sure your listener class is in the classpath where JIRA can see it — the best locations are usually the <jira-application-dir>/WEB-INF/classes or <jira-application-dir>/WEB-INF/lib subdirectories within of your JIRA Installation Directory (as JAR files).

To register a listener:

1. Log in as a user with the 'JIRA System Administrators' global permission.
2. Choose Administration at the top right of your screen. Then choose System > Advanced > Listeners (tab) to open the 'Listeners' page.
   Keyboard shortcut: 'g' + 'g' + type 'lis'
3. In the 'Add Listener' form at the bottom of the page, complete the following fields:
   
   • 'Name' — an appropriately descriptive name for the listener.
   • 'Class' — the fully-qualified class name of your listener.
     add-listener.png
     To use one of JIRA's built-in listener classes, first click the 'Built-in Listeners' link to expand the list of listener classes and then click the name of the specific class in the list. The fully-qualified class name of the built-in listener will be added to the 'Class' field.
4. Click the 'Add' button and the listener will now be added to the list of listeners above.

Editing Listener Properties

If your listener accepts parameters or properties, you can edit these by clicking the 'Edit' link associated with your listener (on the 'Listeners' page in JIRA's Administration area).

When defining your own Listener, there is a method getAcceptedParams to overload for defining the parameter names, pass as an array of String objects. The DebugParamListener class is an example of doing this.

Removing a Listener

To remove a listener, click the 'Delete' link associated with that listener (on the 'Listeners' page in JIRA's Administration area).

Custom Events

With the ability to add custom events to JIRA, the Listener must be updated to deal with the event as appropriate. This is possible by providing an implementation for the method customEvent(IssueEvent event) in the Listener. For example, the MailListener implementation passes the custom event on for notification processing. The DebugListener logs that the custom event has been fired.

See Also

• Plugin Tutorial - Writing event listeners with the atlassian-event library — this describes how to write listeners using the Atlassian Events library (see JIRA-specific Atlassian Events), rather than the JIRA Listener Events described above.