Jira issue filters used as notifications

August 02, 2015

atlassian
jira

Using Atlassian Jira, it is very useful to have notifications for issues, created or edited, of your projects.

Unfortunately, to enable custom notifications, you have to create a notification scheme and only an administrator can do that.

Jira, however, offers you the ability to save searches, called filters and the results can be delivered by email through subscriptions.

With the right filter and the right subscription you can set Jira to notify you via email if and only if issues of your projects are creted or edited, without clogging your inbox.

The main problem is that if you create a subscription to a filter to be triggered every 15 minutes, you will receive tons of emails.

That’s because every time the filter is triggered it will get all the issues of your project and you will receive an email.

The trick here is to create a filter that get all the issues of your project that are created or edited in the last 15 minutes and then create a subscription that trigs every 15 minutes.

This way you will receive an email only if issues are created or edited.

Please note that if you open the filter with the Jira web panel, chances are that you will not see any issues at all: that is correct because to see something you have to open the filter within 15 minutes an issue is created.

The filter is there only for the subscription to work.

So create a filter like this:

project = PROJECTCODE AND (created >= -15m OR updated >= -15m)

jira_filter_subscription_001

Then create a daily filter subscription that trigs every 15 minutes:

jira_filter_subscription_002

With that filter and subscription in place, you should receive an email everytime an issue is created or edited.

The main drawback of this method is that you will have 15 minutes of delay between the moment the issue is created / edited and the moment you receive the email (or the moment the email is being sent), but I think this is a good compromise.

Of course, the best way is to contact the admin and add a notification scheme but this method can come in handy for a quick solution.