Accessing JIRA via the ABL HTTP client

This repo contains sample code for interacting with Jira using the ABL HTTP Client, as presented in various presentations.

Useful links

REST API	https://docs.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/api/REST/7.6.1
Atlassian Document Format	https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/jira/platform/apis/document/structure/

Common functions

The common_functions.i include contains a number of shared functions. It is included in the get_release_notes.p and update_ticket.p programs. Each internal procedure has a varying parameters.

Internal procedure	Description
build_client	Creates an instance of the HTTP client to communicate with the Jira instance.
delete_request	Sends an HTTP DELETE request to the Jira instance, at a specified URL
get_credentials	Reads the jira-credentials.json file (see below)
get_request	Sends an HTTP GET request to the Jira instance, at a specified URL. The responses are limited to the first 1000 records returned (via the startAt and maxResults query parameters)
post_new_request	Sends an HTTP POST request to the Jira instance, at a specified URL. An X-Atlassian-Token:no-check header is sent to avoid "XSRF check failed" errors)
put_update_request	Sends an HTTP PUT request to the Jira instance, at a specified URL.

Other

The jira-credentials.json file contains the username and password used to create a basic authentication header. The value for the password is an API token generated per the instructions at https://support.atlassian.com/atlassian-account/docs/manage-api-tokens-for-your-atlassian-account/#Use-an-API-token .

The programs in the OpenEdge folder contain patches issues in to the HTTP client; these may be fixed in future releases. This code was created and tested against OpenEdge 12.5.1.

The hctracing.config file enables the client tracing. This can be disabled by either setting the value of the enabled property to false in the config file, or by passing FALSE to the build_client method.

Getting release notes from Jira

The get_release_notes.p program queries Consultingwerk's Jira instance, and builds a ProDataSet containing release note data for the tickets for a release. The ProDataSet contains 2 temp-tables: ttRelnote and ttAttachment. The former contains the release note texts, and the latter zero or more attachements for the ticket. Jira tickets are filtered by type (only Bug and Improvement are kept), and by project (SCL) and release.

Example JSON output

{
    "dsRelnote": {
        "releaseNotes": [
            {
                "JiraId": "SCL-3675",
                "IssueType": "Improvement",
                "IssueDescription": "Potential improvements when retrieving field values.",
                "NoteTitle": "Investigate potential improvements to the DatasetModel performance",
                "NoteDescription": "."
            },
            {
                "JiraId": "SCL-3742",
                "IssueType": "Bug",
                "IssueDescription": "!image-20220816-034509.png|width=904,height=556!",
                "NoteTitle": "Exporting of smartrepo files from GUI thin client fails with Database smartdb not connected",
                "NoteDescription": ".",
                "attachments": [
                    {
                        "JiraId": "SCL-3742",
                        "Attachment": "<base63-encoded BLOB field>",
                        "ContentType": "image\/png",
                        "Filename": "image-20220816-034509.png",
                        "AttachmentUrl": "https:\/\/consultingwerk.atlassian.net\/rest\/api\/2\/attachment\/content\/28632"
                    }
                ]
            }
        ]
    }
}

This code will need to be modified to be used on other Jira instances, particularly where Consultingwerk uses custom fields (the names of these fields may change in different Jira instances). A number of .json files are created during the run of the program - these were used during the talk to demo the responses.

Writing to Jira

The update_ticket.p program has a number of internal procedures that are used to create and update Jira tickets. The program updates the DEMO project in Consultingwerk's Jira instance. Each procedure has varying parameters.

Internal procedure	Description
add_comment	Adds a comment to an issue. This can use either the "Add Comment" or the "Edit Issue" approach
add_attachment	Adds a file as an attachment to an issue
add_watcher	Adds a user to the list of watchers for an issue
add_web_link	Adds a remote (non-Jira) web link to an issue
assign_issue	Assigned an issue to a user.
create_issue	Creates an issue of a specified type in the DEMO project
create_subtask	Creates a subtask for an issue
get_assignable_users	Builds a temp-table of users to which an issue can be assigned. In this case, only users belonging to the "Consultingwerk" group can be assigned issues.
get_create_metadata	Returns the metadata relating to issue creation in the DEMO project.
get_issue_id	Returns the Jira issue ID based on a key
link_issues	Links two issues (eg blocks or clones)
link_github_issue	Adds a remote (non-Jira) web link to an issue. This links are based on the Github issue number in this project. These links will be grouped under a GitHub Issues heading
remove_watcher	Removes a user from the list of watchers for an issue
update_status	Transitions an issue to another status.