Changes to Jira Data Synchronization due to Atlassian GDPR Changes | Inflectra

Changes to Jira Data Synchronization due to Atlassian GDPR Changes

March 8th, 2019 by inflectra

For those of you who keep up with the Atlassian ecosystem, you will most likely be aware of some breaking API changes that they are making to their cloud platform. This article describes the changes and explains what that means for Inflectra customers.

What Is Atlassian Changing

Unlike Spira which uses numeric User IDs in its APIs, Jira has traditionally used actual login names (e.g. "fred.bloggs") as the user token in all of its APIs. Unfortunately this can cause customers who need to comply with GDPR data privacy rules some issues. So as part of an update to their cloud platform (but not the Jira server platform) they have changed their REST API so that:

  • A new accountId field is available which contains a GUID style identifier
  • They are removing the existing user fields that display personal information:
    • username
    • name

However they are unfortunately not making the same changes to their Jira server product, so going forward the Jira cloud REST API will not be compatible with the Jira server API (and vice-versa).

What Changes Have We Made?

In preparation for the new updates to the Atlassian Jira cloud, we have rolled out a new updated cloud-only version of our Jira data synchronization plugin. This new plugin is used by our cloud-synchronization system, and will sync cloud instances of Spira with cloud instances of Jira. You should need to make any changes on your end, however in some cases you may need to adjust your user mappings:

  • If you use the Auto-Map feature, you need to have the logins to Spira have the same email address as the equivalent users in Jira
  • If you don't use the Auto-Map feature, you need to map your Spira users to the email address of the user in Jira (not the login name, if they are different).

For download / on-premise Spira customers, you will continue to use the same Jira plugin that we have provided. This works with Jira server without change.

What Else Do I Need to Do?

If you are setting the reporter or assignee of issues in Spira and you want them to sync to Jira, you will need to make sure that the email address is visible in the Jira REST API.

The global setting User email visibility will control the visibility of email addresses in the Jira REST API. Even though you may be able to view email addresses in the GUI, they remain hidden in the API unless that setting is changed.

Changing that setting will allowed the emailAddress attribute to appear in the API.

 

jira api data synchronization atlassian plugins