Jira uses an event system where every issue operation, such as creating a new issue or workflow transition, will trigger a corresponding event to be fired. As we have seen, notification schemes map events to notification recipients. This way, we are able to set up flexible notification rules to notify different people for different events.

Jira provides many different notification recipient types. Some, such as Current Assignee and Reporter, are very simple—they will simply take the value of the current issue's assignee and reporter field respectively. Other options, such as User Custom Field Value, can be very flexible. For example, you can create a multi-user picker custom field, and for each issue, you can have a different list of users as recipients, without having to modify the actual scheme itself.

Events are also mapped to email templates so that Jira knows what to use for the subject and body. You cannot change the mapping for system events, but as we will see in the next recipe, we can create custom events and select which templates to use.