This page last changed on Oct 21, 2010 by ggaskell.


21 October 2010

The Atlassian JIRA team is delighted to present a brand new version of one of the world's favourite issue-trackers.

JIRA 4.2 gives you a few extra minutes of precious time every day, by providing the ability to triage issues directly from the Issue Navigator without you having to open each issue. For the mouse-averse, the new 'Operations Dialog' box provides access to all menu options via the keyboard.

To help speed up your ability to work on issues, we've also made common actions and workflow operations accessible from convenient dialog boxes.

Time-tracking has become much more flexible: you can now edit the Original Estimate, and set the Remaining Estimate to zero when resolving an issue. You can also log work via workflow 'transition' (or any other) screens.

The 'Labels' plugin is now a permanent part of JIRA, simplifying system management for GreenHopper users and administrators — and everyone else who likes to label their JIRA issues.

Note to developers: JIRA 4.2 includes the Atlassian Plugin Framework version 2.5, and an alpha release of the JIRA REST API. We are very keen to hear your feedback on the REST API — please try it out and add your comments to JRA-22139.

Upgrading to JIRA 4.2 is free for all customers with active JIRA software maintenance as of October 21, 2010.

Highlights of JIRA 4.2:

Thank you for your feedback:

More than 40 new feature requests implemented
More than 850 votes fulfilled

Your votes and issues help us keep improving our products, and are much appreciated.

Upgrading to JIRA 4.2
JIRA 4.2 can be downloaded from the JIRA Download Center. Before upgrading, please refer to the JIRA 4.2 Upgrade Guide.

Highlights of JIRA 4.2

 

Dialogs for Common Actions and Workflow Operations

For faster edits to an issue, pop-up dialogs have replaced screen changes for common actions and workflow operations.

You can now perform an action on an issue (via a dialog) directly from the Issue Navigator — without opening the issue first. The issue marker shows which issue you have selected (via your keyboard) in the result list.

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Keyboard Shortcuts and 'Operations Dialog'

JIRA users can now do more without a mouse — perfect for power users:

Hints also appear at the bottom of a dialog, helping you to learn keyboard shortcuts on the fly:

The new 'Operations Dialog' lets you perform actions via the keyboard (instead of the mouse), using the full-stop ('dot') key to access the 'Actions' and 'Workflow' menus. The Operations Dialog works from the Issue Navigator and also when viewing an individual issue.

See Using Keyboard Shortcuts for more information.

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Issue Labelling

The functionality from the Labels plugin is now included in JIRA out-of-the-box. The labels dialog has a great new UI, and email notifications are now optional when updating labels for an issue.

See Labelling an Issue for more information.

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Improvements to the 'View Issue' Screen

We have improved the look and feel of the 'View Issue' screen even more. Some improvements include:

  • Tighter spacing between lines to reduce space between elements
  • Stronger section headings
  • The 'Description' field separated into its own section
  • Horizontal division lines between each custom field
  • Votes and Watchers fields on the same line
  • Labels represented as bubbles

Individual blocks can now be collapsed to streamline your issue view. The view state (i.e. which blocks are expanded/collapsed) will also be remembered across issues. You can also add a comment at the bottom of the 'Comments' section.

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Auto-complete for Versions and Components

Editing the Component, Affects Version(s) and Fix Version(s) is now quicker and easier. Upon typing into one of these fields, a dropdown menu appears with a list of options matching the first few characters you typed.

For convenience, the version lists are divided into Released and Unreleased categories.

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Attachment Sorting by Date or Name

Attachments can now be sorted by date or by name, in ascending or descending order.

See Attaching a File for more information.

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Viewable Files in Zipped Attachments

You can expand an attached zip file to see its contents. The first 30 files will be shown for larger zip files.

See Accessing ZIP-format File Contents for more information.

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'Log Work' Improvements

You can now log work when you resolve an issue, saving you a step. You can also set the Remaining Estimate to 0 upon resolving an issue.

You now have the ability to edit the Original Estimate, even if work has been logged on an issue (not shown here).

We've also included the ability to add work log descriptions in wiki-markup (not shown here).

Lastly, you can add the 'Log Work' fields to any screen in JIRA (not shown here).

See Logging Work on an Issue for more information.

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Improvements to the Issue Navigator

The Issue Navigator has been updated to match the look and feel of an issue.

We've also added: an issue marker and colour highlight for keyboard navigation (blue); colour highlight for mouse selection (grey); toggle to collapse the search form.

When a change is made via a dialog, JIRA will give you feedback on that change as confirmation.

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'Filter' Gadget creation via the Issue Navigator

When viewing search results, you can quickly add a 'Filter Results' gadget to your dashboard via the 'Views' menu.

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User Avatars and Hover Profile

JIRA users can now add an avatar to their profile. You can then mouse-hover over a user's name to show information about that user — this is available when viewing an issue, using the Issue Navigator, browsing a project, viewing activity, viewing a user profile and performing some administration tasks.

See Adding a User Avatar and Using Hover Profile for more information.

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New JQL Functions

Additional JQL functions for projectsLeadBy and componentsLeadBy — useful for finding all issues where a particular user is the lead of a component, or a project.

See Advanced Searching for more information.

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Other Enhancements and Fixes

  • If you use Firefox or IE, you can now search JIRA issues from the convenience of your browser's search box. Just add your JIRA site as a search engine/provider, via the dropdown menu next to the browser's search box. This is because JIRA now supports the autodiscovery part of the OpenSearch standard.

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Plus over 120 other fixes and improvements

The top 50 most popular issues resolved in JIRA 4.2 are listed below. Click here for the full list.

JIRA Issues (50 issues)
Key Type Summary Priority Status
JRA-868 Improvement Resolve & Time spent Resolved
JRA-1744 New Feature "Log work done" as a MANDATORY field when resolving issues Resolved
JRA-4888 Improvement Can't edit original estimate Resolved
JRA-7624 Improvement Add time tracking fields to the RemoteIssue object Resolved
JRA-1993 Improvement Resolving an issue should automatically put the estimated time remaining to 0 Resolved
JRA-13512 Improvement Setting remaining time to 0 in a post function of the workflow causes the original estimate to be set to 0 as well (only when no time was logged by the assignee) Resolved
JRA-9170 Improvement Enable Wiki Renderering for the Work Log description field Resolved
JRA-13733 Improvement I should be able to change the remaining estimate without logging work done Resolved
JRA-12498 Improvement New functions for SOAP API Resolved
JRA-11276 New Feature SOAP: Retrieving Parent- and Sub- Issues information Resolved
JRA-15734 Bug Issue view page displays mixed security warning dialog in Internet Explorer when viewed over HTTPS Critical Resolved
JRA-5761 Improvement Session timeout should be handled more gracefully. Resolved
JRA-19796 New Feature REST API for JIRA Resolved
JRA-14076 Improvement DoubleConverter / NumberCFType is not as I18N as it could / should be - decimal separator does not respect user's locale Resolved
JRA-8557 Improvement Add a addWatcher( RemoteUser ) and / or addWatcher( RemoteUser[] ) RPC / SOAP method Resolved
JRA-21189 Bug View Issue screen custom tabs show fields from all custom tabs, on page load and when Activity tabs are clicked Major Resolved
JRA-21439 Bug Support Transparent Image for Project Avatar Major Resolved
JRA-20351 Bug AXIS internal SOAP type representation is unstable. Major Resolved
JRA-21105 Bug IE6 over HTTPS displays popup about secure & unsecure content on all view issue pages Major Resolved
JRA-19557 Bug Thumbnail of certain image attachments fail and cause ERROR in log Major Resolved
JRA-20956 Bug Issue View shows fields of second tab when first opened Major Resolved
JRA-15862 Bug Thumbnail in JPEG breaks transparency used in PNG/GIF Minor Resolved
JRA-20995 Bug Privilege escalation vulnerability when administrator access is compromised Blocker Resolved
JRA-20562 Bug JQL breaks issue security levels based on custom fields Critical Resolved
JRA-17759 Bug CAPTCHA image broken when running in OpenJDK Minor Resolved
JRA-15978 Improvement Add functionality to JIRA XML-RPC and soap for downloading attachments Resolved
JRA-21605 Bug New UI makes issue key very hard to select for copy and paste Major Resolved
JRA-7287 New Feature Soap: GetSubTaskParent(IssueKey) Resolved
JRA-21244 Improvement Enable keyboard navigation of users in Assignee drop down Resolved
JRA-21166 Bug Can't select issue summary in issue view screen Major Resolved
JRA-15776 Improvement Get Standalone JIRA to detect the DBCP settings and RDBMS and add warnings if it is using MySQL without a validation query. Resolved
JRA-11682 Improvement Put an 'Add comment' link at the bottom of the page. Resolved
JRA-20994 Bug XSS Vulnerabilities in JIRA Blocker Resolved
JRA-21841 Bug XsrfVulnerabilityDetectionSQLInterceptor causes NPE on GreenHopper Major Resolved
JRA-17760 Bug JIRA does not compile under OpenJDK Minor Resolved
JRA-21876 Bug LDAP delegating CROWD installations are broken by JIRA brute password protection code Critical Resolved
JRA-19947 Bug List of attachments is not kept when updating an issue fails due to validators Major Resolved
JRA-21159 Bug PermGen memory not set, if JAVA_HOME is set incorrectly or missing Minor Resolved
JRA-21308 Bug Comment form buttons aren't visible by scrolling when box fills up the browser window. Minor Resolved
JRA-20810 New Feature Attachment sorting needed like issue sorting Resolved
JRA-22064 New Feature Attachment Sort order Resolved
JRA-15079 Improvement Sent information is lost when data is submitted after session has expired Resolved
JRA-19691 Improvement Attach file should have replace or rename option and default comment Resolved
JRA-8082 Improvement SOAP should be able to find out what groups a user is a member of Resolved
JRA-21806 Improvement Feedback for combo boxes Resolved
JRA-22172 Bug using JSESSIONID from /auth REST resource doesn't work Blocker Resolved
JRA-22287 Bug Failure uploading attachments when uploading time exceeds 1 minute Critical Resolved
JRA-21243 Bug Unable to run from start menu after installation due to Service name on JIRA 4.0 and JIRA 4.1.1 has different SERVICE_NAME description Critical Resolved
JRA-21586 Bug Prevent duplicate form actions from happening Major Resolved
JRA-21054 Bug With Safari 4, Cmd+C on a bug page sometimes jumps up to "Create Bug" popup Major Resolved

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Attachments:

View_issue.jpg (image/jpeg)
hints.png (image/png)
DotEditor_Dialog-04.png (image/png)
bottom_comments.png (image/png)
collapse_section_on_view_issue.png (image/png)
DotEditor_Dialog-02.png (image/png)
keyboard_shortcuts.png (image/png)
DotEditor_Dialog-03.png (image/png)
labels.png (image/png)
assign_on_view_issue.PNG (image/png)
View_issue.png (image/png)
attachment_sort_on_view_issue.png (image/png)
zips_on_view_issue.png (image/png)
new_jql_functions.png (image/png)
view_on_dashboard.PNG (image/png)
components.PNG (image/png)
log_work.png (image/png)
collapse_search_form.png (image/png)
notify.PNG (image/png)
assign_on_issue_nav.PNG (image/png)
dot_dialog_on_issue_nav.png (image/png)
user_avatars.png (image/png)
attachment_sort_on_view_issue.png (image/png)
Document generated by Confluence on Mar 27, 2011 18:40