Found a piece that isn’t well documented. But as usual, I’m explaining my steps and then the solution. It’s no real big deal anyway. 🙂
Here’s the background:
Mission was to write a Groovy script that returns all the transition screens used across all workflows of a given JIRA workflow scheme (for documentation purposes). This looked pretty easier, until a collection of ‘com.opensymphony.workflow.loader.ActionDescriptor’ came up without any linked JavaDocs. That looked like a dead end.
Then, with a little bit of googling I came across ActionDescriptor source code, which wasn’t helpful either. getView() method looked promising because ‘Transition View’ is a synonym used in JIRA UI for ‘Transition Screen’. But disappointingly it was just returning string ‘fieldscreen’ for every transition. Aw.. snap! 😦
Next attempt is called the ‘Bruteforce method’ (not java.lang.reflect.Method of course 😉 ).
Since I was too lazy to read across the ActionDescriptor’s source code:
// workflow is type of com.atlassian.jira.workflow.JiraWorkflow
// I'm not explaining all my code here
workflow.getAllActions().each {
it.class.getDeclaredMethods().grep {
it.name.matches( "^get.*" )
}.each {
log.debug ( it.name )
}
}
getAutoExecute getConditionalResults getPreFunctions getUnconditionalResult getMetaAttributes getValidators getPostFunctions getRestriction getView getName
It didn’t took much of time. With a bit of guessing I made my first attempt with getter method ‘getMetaAttributes()’. And it had the eye-catching piece I was looking for!
workflow.getAllActions().each {
log.debug ( it.getMetaAttributes().toString() )
}
[opsbar-sequence:10, jira.description:, jira.fieldscreen.id:10000] [opsbar-sequence:20, jira.description:, jira.fieldscreen.id:20000] [opsbar-sequence:40, jira.description:, jira.fieldscreen.id:30000] [opsbar-sequence:60, jira.description:, jira.fieldscreen.id:30000]
getMetaAttributes() returns a HashMap. So, finally…
def screens = [:]
workflow.getAllActions().each {
def screenId = it.getMetaAttributes()["jira.fieldscreen.id"]
if ( screenId != "" ) {
def workflowAction = workflow.name + " - " + it.name
def workflowActions = []
if ( screens[screenId] ) workflowActions = screens[screenId]
workflowActions.add ( workflowAction )
screens[screenId] = workflowActions
}
}
for ( e in screens ) {
log.debug ( "Transition Screen: " + e.key )
e.value.each {
log.debug ( " Workflow action: " + it )
}
}
Nice! This HashMap (‘screens’) is all what I wanted. 🙂 Each transition screen, and then where it has been used.
So one last thing… I also wanted to have a one last peek into ActionDescriptor’s source code on GitHub. Only the writeXML() method gave an indication that metaAttributes is actually a HashMap. There was absolutely no indication that screen association information is kept as a ‘meta attribute‘.
Bottom line(s):
- If you are a JIRA developer and whenever you want to find screens associated to a workflow, don’t use getView(). Use getMetaAttributes() and then look for the attribute with key “jira.fieldscreen.id”. In other words, transition screen is stored as a meta attribute in each transition. Screen is referred by its numeric ID as a string.
- Since OpenSymphony doesn’t seem to go away from JIRA, and some already claim that OpenSymphony is dead, it would be worthwhile if Atlassian maintains their own repository of OSWorkflow docs and special remarks.
