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COMPONENT WATCHER for Jira Cloud
Component Watcher allows you to add watchers to all Issues within a project based on the Component(s) assigned to the Issue and other optional criteria (Issue Type, Priority and Status). Examples of some of what you can watch for based on one or more selected Components are:
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Watch for all changes to Issues with a specific Component.
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Watch all Issues that are bugs and have a priority of Highest.
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Be notified whenever work starts to be logged on an issue.
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Get an email whenever an Issue gets a status of "Ready to Test"
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Have everyone in a user group get an email whenever an Issue is closed.
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Receive an email whenever an Issue is deleted or moved to another Project
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Monitor each time an Issues status changes
This is just a small subset of what can be done and notifications can be sent by Email or shown within a JIRA dashboard gadget.
Configuring Component Watcher
The configuration screen (Add-ons tab and Component Watcher section) for Component Watcher allows you to setup the specify who gets access to the Component Watcher tab in Projects.
Access to the Project Watcher Project tab can be limited to Project Administrators only or to all users.
Project Tab - Component Watcher
The Project tab for the Component Watcher plugin is where watchers of a Component are defined. Initially there is just an Add button for adding your first watcher. The screenshot below shows the screen with multiple watchers already added.
The first of the watchers shown above will cause an email notification to be sent to "Paul Clark" whenever an Issue with the Components "Backend" and "Front End" has any modification made to it.
The second watcher will mean that a notification(when adding or editing a comment in an Issue with the Component "Backend") will be available to view within the dashboard gadget for the user "Joe Bloggs". See the My Notifications below section for more details.
The third watcher will send an email to all users in the group "jira-administrators" whenever any change is made on an Issue has the Component "Proxy Server", that is of the type "Bug" and has a Priority of "Highest".
On the right-hand side of each watcher are two buttons, the pencil for editing and the trash can for deleting the watcher. Above these is the Add button for creating new Watchers. Below is the screen for adding new watchers. At the top right of the dialog is the Mode. This signifies if you are editing in Basic or Advanced mode, that latter showing more fields
At the top of the screen is the Enabled (messages are not sent to disabled watchers) and a list of Components. You must have at least one component ticked. If there is more than one component ticked then a notification will be sent if the Issue has at least one of the Components.
Next is a list of events that are related to this watcher. At least one event in the "Only Notify for" must be selected. The events description should be enough to under what is happening. One exception to this is the Issue Update event. This covers events listed above (Issue Type Changed, Priority Changed and Status Changed) but not comment added or comment edited.
The next field is the Notification Type. This can be either Email or In JIRA. The "In JIRA" type means that the notifications can be view within JIRA using a dashboard gadget. See the My Notifications section for more details.
Advanced Mode
In Advanced mode the following additional fields are visible:
At the top, are the Issue Types, Priorities and Statuses fields refer to the same fields that are in the Issue. If these fields are empty then any Issue Type, Priority or Status will match. If these fields have a single value then the Issue must have this value to be applicable. If a field has multiple values then the Issue must have one of the values to be applicable. If all three of these fields have at least one value then the Issue must have a match for each field to be applicable.
Under these fields is the Exclude for Users field. This allows you to exclude any notifications if they are one of the users enter here. Leave blank to exclude no users.
Email Notifications
If the Notification Type is email then the following options are available.
The fields associated with email include "Send Email to User(s)" and "Send Email to Group(s)". These two fields determine who will get the email. You must have at least one of these fields. The first is individual JIRA users that will receive the email. The second is a JIRA user group and all users in this group(s) will receive the email.
Next is the email prefix. This is an optional field and any text will be placed before the subject line in the email. If an email prefix is also defined in JIRA (for the outbound email handler) then the JIRA prefix will appear first, then the Project Watcher prefix and then the subject. After this is the Compact Subject checkbox. This allows you to have a smaller version of the email subject with just the bare minimum details.
At the end is a list of "Also Include Fields" which are only available in Advanced mode. Any of these that are checked will mean they are included in the email message. These are optional.
Below are some example emails, the last of which has all of the "Also Include Fields" fields checked.
In JIRA Notifications
If the Notification Type is In JIRA then the following options are available.
Show for Users is a list of users that will receive the In JIRA notification. After this is a list of additional fields to include in the notification. These fields are only available in Advanced mode.
My Notifications
To view In JIRA notifications you need to add a new gadget to the dashboard.
Once the gadget has been installed the In JIRA notifications will be showning within the dashboard.
At the top right are four buttons that (left to right)
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Delete all visible read notifications
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Mark all visible notifications as NOT read
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Mark all visible notifications as read
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Delete all visible notifications
The buttons for deletions and marking notifications read only apply to notifications visible on the screen. By default, only the last twenty notifications are initially displayed. To see more there is a Show More link at the bottom of the list (only displayed if there are more), which will show another twenty.
At the top-left are details of when the last time new notifications were checked for when the next time new notifications were checked for and a link to force the checking for new notifications. The time between automated checks varies depending on the time of the day. Between 8 am and 6 pm checks are done every 5 minutes, between 6 pm and 9 pm checks are done every fifteen minutes and the rest of the time they are done every hour.
Notifications are grouped under the date they occurred. The notifications shown are initially in a minimal format. Hovering over text will show the full text and clicking on the ">" characters will expand the details to allow you to read all the information easily. On the right of each notification are a read button (to mark the notification read/unread) and a delete button. The delete button will permanently delete the notification, although there is a link shown at the top of the gadget (displayed for 10 seconds) to undo a delete.
Read notifications reduced in size and dimmed out.
Purging Old Data
Because of constraints of cloud storage, old data will be deleted using the following logic:
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Any unread notification greater than two weeks will automatically be deleted.
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Any read notification older than one week will be deleted.