Smart defaults - introduction

This chapter provides basic information about Smart defaults and Smart expressions used in templates.

The Issue Templates for Jira app provides additional Smart defaults tab available in templates (on the right side of the Issue View, in Issue Glance). The Smart defaults tab provides a Select, where you can find all fields supported in your project.

You can edit template fields and fill them with Smart expressions.

With smart defaults you can calculate the field’s value at the time when an issue is created from the template.

You can, for instance, configure a template that would automate the process of:

filling the starting date.
setting a deadline.
setting a reporter and assigning an issue to a specific role or person.
creating a label.
setting a version.

You can also prepare a timeline for complex tasks with multiple steps or link an epic with smart defaults.

Try live demo:

Tip

See How to use smart defaults for details and examples.

Advanced

Inherit Values

By using the parent expression, you can easily configure nested (child) templates to inherit values provided in the parent. This can be useful when you need to set the same component, version or labels in all epic’s issues and want to use the same template in different scenarios. Just enter a field value in the Create issue dialog. All children created from the primary template inherit the given value.

Pass the values to linked issues

To use the parent accessor issues need to be in a parent-child relation, for example children of an epic or subtasks. Linked issues don’t have such a relation. If you want to pass down values from your primary issue (issue from which the templating process starts), you can use the primaryIssue accessor.

Example

primaryIssue - will access a field for which it is configured

primaryIssue.fix_versions - provides a short form of a field name with _ instead of space in case you want to configure it for other field, for example, Affects Versions

primaryIssue.field("Fix versions") - use a field expression with an exact name if your field contains special characters

primaryIssue.customfield_10330 - use a custom field key in case you have more than 1 field with the same name

Fill in the field using dynamic variable

With the expression variable("variable name") you can use values provided with Dynamic variables in custom/system fields. You can refer variables in all children and linked issues.

This can be useful when you want to set the same value across the whole structure, and at the same time you want to use variables for the same value in different fields, for example as a part of a summary or description. This approach is much more flexible than using a simple parent expression.

Supported actions:

assigning a user provided with :user type dynamic variable, all user type fields are supported, for example, assignee, reporter, user pickers
passing a :date or :datetime variable to a date or a datetime field type, for example, Due date, Start date, Date Picker, Date Time Picker, etc.
setting priority, components, versions, custom selects (single & multi) from select variables

Compute the field value when using templates

Value of any field can be computed using vast Smart expressions. Expressions that can be used depend on the type of field against which you are calculating the value, for example, a user field, like reporter, can be set to project lead by the project.lead expression.