Baseline C# Objects to Populate Jira DevInfo Pt. 1

Jira has this great “Development Information” (DevInfo) that can be associated with your work items. Which has an API described here. The information provided in the development tabs are for Branches, Commits, Pull Requests, Builds, Deployments and Feature Flags. Which is a way to have visibility into all the development/code activity that is related to a particular work item. It’s a great way to connect everything together.

It really is great, but there are some pieces of the puzzle that can be improved. For example:

• Currently, github also associates code commits, pull requests, and build/action information into an issues history. But, github’s layout intermingles those changes within the history of an issue to create a timeline. This allows for a reviewer of an issue, to visually see when a change was made, what the context was surrounding that change. Maybe there was a compelling argument made by a team member half way through an issue being worked on. And, that argument resulted in 5 files changing; you can see that in the github history.
  
  But, Jira’s history won’t show you that because the conversation history (Jira Comments) do not intermingle the code commits, pull requests, builds or deployments to create a timeline history.
  
  That would be a really nice improvement. And, on a personal note, if would make reviewing my coworkers work items a lot easier.
  
• The Commits display (screenshot above) has a weird little bug in it. The Files Count Column (right side) should be able to display a count of all the files within a commit. The File Details Display, the list of files associated with a commit (“MODIFIED  PullRequest/Send-AzDPRStatusUpdates.ps1/” in the screenshot), will only show the first 10 files from the commit. But the File Count Column isn’t showing the total count of files, it only showing the count of files in the File Details Display that number (“1 file” in the screenshot). This seems to be a bug, but I haven’t reported it yet.
  
  (PS. Why is there a ‘/’ on the end of “PullRequest/Send-AzDPRStatusUpdates.ps1/”? The information submitted to the API did not have a slash on the end.)
  
• The Documentation is REALLY CONFUSING when it comes urls. All of the examples in the documentation present url structures that look like this:
  
  https://your-domain.atlassian.net/rest/devinfo/0.10/bulk
  
  Except, that’s not the right url!!
  
  All the APIs have an “Authorization” section in their documentation, which has a link to Integrate JSW Cloud with On-Premise Tools. And BURIED in that documentation is this quick note:
  
  The root URL for OAuth 2.0 operations is: https://api.atlassian.com/jira/<entity type>/0.1/cloud/<cloud ID>/

Note that this URL is different to the URLs used in the documentation. However, you easily translate from one to the other. For example, POST /rest/builds/0.1/bulk translates to POST https://api.atlassian.com/jira/builds/0.1/cloud/<cloud ID>/bulk.

And I agree that it’s easy to translate. But, you have to first know that you need to translate it. Maybe, an alternative direction to take is to update the OAuth 2.0 APIs documentation to use the correct urls? Or, explicitly state it on all the API documentation, so that you don’t have to find it in a separate page?


Atlassian/Jira does provide this really great C# SDK for working/reading Jira issues. But, the SDK doesn’t contain any objects/code to work with the “DevInfo”. So, I want to post a couple baseline objects which can be used in an aspnetcore/netstandard application to push information to the DevInfo endpoint in Atlassian/Jira Cloud …

But, before doing that, this post will be of a few baseline objects to authenticate with the Atlassian/Jira OAuth 2.0 endpoint.

The next post will contain objects to use with the “DevInfo” API.