Following some user feedback, I’ve made some changes to the JIRA plugin I wrote for dragging sub-tasks, first mentioned in this post Jira web-resource plugin to drag and drop subtasks.

If you’ve used it, you may have found it annoying that it was actually too easy to drag subtasks, causing page refreshes when they weren’t wanted! Copying and pasting from the subtask list was impossible. You could also drag issues in the Issue Navigator, although it didn’t achieve anything.

Just a few teething problems then.

First I put a delay in the jQuery sortable options. I also stopped the page from submitting if the list order had not been changed. This was a definite improvement, but users still wanted to copy text from the list, which wasn’t possible. So now I’ve limited the “drag handle” to the cell in the table where the up and down arrows appear for sorting. You can only drag if you click in that area, anywhere else won’t work. It’s still not ideal, as it’s not immediately obvious how to drag. Better ideas welcomed!

You can get the updated source from github: https://github.com/anorakgirl/subtask-dragger/releases/tag/v0.6.
Or if you don’t feel like packaging it yourself, there’s a jar for download here: subtask-dragger-0.6.jar. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Today I’ve been making a simple plugin for Jira, to allow drag and drop reordering of subtasks. As standard, a list of subtasks comes with links to move the items one position up or down – tedious if you want to move a long way!

Getting up and running with the Atlassian plugin SDK is really straightforward.

The plugin contains only a web-resource with the JavaScript I want to run. I’m not particularly familiar with jQuery, so it may be a little hacky or non-optimal, but it works!

A couple of useful things I learnt:

Jira provides some very specific contexts to determine which pages will include the resource. In my case, the web-resource definition in my atlassian-plugin.xml contains the line:

<context>jira.view.issue</context>

You can see all the web-resource contexts here: Web Resource plugin module contexts.

Because the list of subtasks could contain issues hidden to the current user, I parsed the new position for the sub task from the links which already exist for moving the subtasks up and down, rather than just using the row index.

You can see the source here: https://github.com/anorakgirl/subtask-dragger

Or you can download a jar here: subtask-dragger-0.1.jar. DISCLAIMER: This is just a demo, use at your own risk!