• Article
  • Mar.16.2017

nFeed 5.10: a cleaner display, savvier JQL queries and JIRA Automation integration

  • Mar.16.2017
  • Reading time mins

nFeed for Jira is now called Elements Connect. While the app has a new name, the team behind it remains the same. Learn more >

After a bit of a wait and some hard work, we are now pleased to announce new functionalities that should improve the user experience of your JIRA or JIRA Service Desk instances.

What is our promise? An improved display of multi-value nFeed fields, more flexibility for your nFeed JQL queries and fast creation of automation rules for your nFeed fields. Pretty neat stuff!

Unlock the power of your nFeed JQL queries (selectively)

nFeed can fetch data from a vast variety of data sources, even the JIRA instance on which it is running.
When it comes to querying the local JIRA, we have two options:

  • Either executing SQL queries on JIRA database – this is the most powerful way but also the most complex
  • Or using the power and simplicity of JQL to query local JIRA issues and display their fields values with nFeed

Until now, when nFeed queries the local JIRA with JQL, we faced a limitation; nFeed could only retrieve issues visible by the current user. This means that if you want to enforce security by not giving access to a certain project yet still be able to retrieve data from it, you could only go with the SQL mode. This case is frequent when a nFeed field is used by customers of a JIRA Service Desk project who have a limited access to the JIRA instance.

With this new version of nFeed you can unlock your JQL fields by simply ticking the option from the field configuration:

jql-security-option

There’s also no need to worry about security – it won’t give access to all your JIRA issues to any user, but only to those made available by the field query and it will only display the fields selected in the display template.

Automate fields updates with the JIRA Automation plug-in

Have you heard of the JIRA Automation plug-in? If not we would recommend downloading it now… or maybe once you have read this article (smile)

Anyways, it is a free add-on developed by Atlassian that JIRA admins can use to execute a bunch of actions, when either triggered by an event or set up on a regular basis, based on a CRON expression.  Actions are numerous, ranging from leaving a comment to adding a label to an issue.

Here’s the good news – with this new nFeed release, it is now possible to set or update the value of nFeed fields!

This is particularly handy when you want to set the value of the fields when an issue is created the easy way. You can also use it to periodically update the value of your read-only fields.

We tried to stick to Automation UX by keeping the configuration sweet and simple. Choose the “Set nFeed fields value” from the list of actions available, select the nFeed fields to update in the drop-down, and that’s it! When the automation rule is executed, all the nFeed fields selected will be populated or updated on the issues matching the rule.

automation-action

Add headers and footers to your template

Sometimes, it’s a bit of a headache to find an elegant way to display data. We want to maximise the visible information but keep the interface clean and clear. Often, the best solution is to display a good ol’ table or bullet list.

nFeed fields do not escape the rule.

Now, you can define the header and footer of your multi-value nFeed fields and thus you can create tables or bullet lists!

The capacities are not just limited to tables and lists – we are sure you’ll find other exciting ideas which take advantage of this new feature.

The configuration is pretty simple; if your field has the multiple values mode, you’ll see extra attributes before and after the template:

header-footer-configuration

In this example, we display all our results in a table. The header will be displayed only once, the body will be repeated for each field value and finally nFeed will append the footer to close the table. And because nFeed fields are displayed in JIRA, we can use the components made available by the AUI library!

The result is a clean table:

header-footer-result

That’s all folks!

We hope that you’ll enjoy this new version of nFeed, which we’ve also made some additions to improve the stability of the product.

If you want more details, have a look at the tutorial we’ve added to the product documentation: Display similar requests to your JIRA Service Desk agents to quickly detect duplicates. You’ll discover how nFeed can be used to display other requests posted on a JSD portal related to the current request – by automatically computing this field on issue creation.

Have any questions regarding these new features?
We’d love to hear from you, so please leave a comment below!

Try nFeed for free

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