Armed with the new knowledge that you have gathered in this chapter, together with fields from the previous chapter, it is time for you to further customize your JIRA to provide a better user experience through presentation.
What we will do this time is create new screens and apply them to our Help Desk project. We want to separate the generic fields from our specialized custom fields designed for escalation. We also want to, at this time, apply the changes to the issues of type Incident only and not affect the other issue types. As with any changes to be done on a production system, it is critical that you have a backup of your current data before applying changes. Backup strategy is discussed in Chapter 10, General Administration.
In Chapter 4, Field Management, you have created a few custom fields specifically designed for our support teams. As you have learned, those fields are added to the default screen. The first thing you need to do is to create a couple of screens for your Help Desk project only, to avoid affecting any other screens used by other projects and teams.
We will be creating three screens—one for creating and viewing issues, one for updating issues, and one to transition issues through the workflow. Since workflow is covered in the next chapter, we will just create the screen and come back to it when we discuss workflows:
Help Desk Create/View Screen
.Screen for create/view help desk issues
.The next step is to set up the tabs for our new screen. We would like to have the default fields on the first screen to capture generic issue data, then we will place the new custom fields that were created in Chapter 4, Field Management, onto a new tab called Escalation, as follows:
General
.Escalation
.Now that you have your screen and tabs, it is time to place your fields onto them, using the following steps:
Field |
Tab |
---|---|
Summary |
General |
Issue Type |
General |
Security Level |
General |
Priority |
General |
Due Date |
General |
Component/s |
General |
Affects Version/s |
General |
Fix Version/s |
General |
Assignee |
General |
Reporter |
General |
Environment |
General |
Description |
General |
Time Tracking |
General |
Attachment |
General |
Escalation List |
Escalation |
Escalation Level |
Escalation |
Is Escalation Required |
Escalation |
Of course, you might be thinking that this can be done much faster if we just clone the default screen and move the escalation fields over to the new tab, and you are absolutely correct. However, we are just doing it manually this time to learn the process.
We have created and configured our first create/view screen. Our new edit screen is going to look very similar to this, with just a few modifications. We want to take the Issue Type field off since we do not want users to change the issue type all the time, and we are going to take the Escalation Level field off as it makes little sense to have a non-editable field on the edit screen. Since we are only taking off some fields from an existing screen, instead of going through the entire create and configure process, let's spare ourselves the tedious clicking, and copy the screen we just created, since we have already done it once:
Help Desk Edit Screen
.Screen for edit help desk issues
.Since we have copied the screen, we inherit all of the fields and tabs so there is no need to reconfigure them. All we need to do is to remove the fields we do not need:
The last step is to create your third screen, which we will use in the next chapter. This screen will be used during workflow transitions, and we would like to allow users to reassign the issue and also update the Escalation List field. Since this is going to be a fairly simple screen, we will create it from scratch:
Help Desk Workflow Screen
.Screen for transition help desk issues
.You now have your fully configured screens set up, but they are not in use right now. The next step is to establish the associations with their respective issue operations.
With the screens created and configured, we now need to link them up with issue operations so that JIRA will know on which action the new screens should be displayed:
Help Desk Incident Screen Scheme
.Screen scheme for Help Desk incidents
.With our screen scheme in place, it is time to link up our screens with their respective issue operations:
Since we have assigned Help Desk Create/View Screen to Default, this screen will be applied to the unmapped operations; that is, Create Issue and View Issue. There are no differences if you choose to explicitly set the mappings for the preceding two operations.
Now, you need to tell JIRA which issue type to apply the screen scheme to that you just created. We will be applying our new screens to issues of type Incident initially, since those are usually the type of issues that require immediate attention and appropriate escalation. For future enhancements, you can further customize your design, so that each issue type will have its own screen design.
The first step is to create a new issue type screen scheme to be used specifically for our project:
Help Desk Issue Type Screen Scheme
.With the scheme created, you can establish the associations between screen schemes and issue types:
This will ensure that issues of type Incident will have your new screens applied while issues of other types will not be affected.
The last step is to activate all the screens and schemes you created so far in this chapter and see them in action. Remember that there is only one thing you need to do—choose your project and configure it to use your issue type screen scheme:
If you are performing this on a live production system, it is recommended that you alert the users of the change and perform this when there are not many users on the system.
This is it; all done! You can now take a look at your hard work and see your custom screens, fields, and tabs, all working nicely together to present you with a custom form for collecting user data.
Let's go ahead and create a new incident and see what your newly customized Create Issue screen will look like:
As you can see, your new screen is nicely divided into two tabs with your new custom fields on the Escalation tab. If you create an issue of type Ticket, you will see that it will not have the tabbed screen design.