30. 03. 2020 Gabriele Cecco Service Management

The Beauty and Power of JQL

In this period of Smart Working I am deepening my study of Atlassian products, in particular Jira Software and Jira Service Desk.

One of the things that impressed me most about Atlassian products is the flexibility of the search engine given by the JQL (Jira Query Language).

I must say that initially when I saw the first examples of JQL I looked at it with suspicion. I’m used to querying MySQL to find the data I need, and a higher level language didn’t seem like it would be that flexible to me.

I was wrong, because I had the mindset of the system administrator who has access to the entire database and looks for practically all the data entered into the system, while often the person who accesses the data is an operator or a supervisor.

And I was also wrong because I had not yet seen all the JQL Operators and the many functions that you can use.

To give you some examples, thanks to the operators WAS, WAS IN, WAS NOT, WAS NOT IN, and CHANGED, it’s possible to go back to the list of open tickets in a range of dates which a normal “agent side” search doesn’t really show.

Here’s an example of a JQL statement:

status WAS "Open" AND
(created >= <start date> and created <= <end date>)

Also thanks to JQL Functions you can have the list of tickets created or modified since the last time the operator logged on.

Here are two examples of beautiful JQL functions:

  • With the following statement you can search all issues created or updated from the user’s last login:
          created >= lastLogin() OR updated >= lastLogin()
  • With the following statement you can search all issues updated from the user’s last login and assigned to the current user:
 

          updated > lastlogin() AND assignee = currentUser()

The possibilities are many. In addition, the filters can be shared with other agents and can be used to feed dashboards and graph results.

On the internet you can find many examples and tutorials on the use of JQL, certainly a theme to be explored further!

Gabriele Cecco

Gabriele Cecco

Technical Consultant at Würth Phoenix
For several years I have been managing processes with trouble ticket systems. After having worked with some of those, EriZone impressed me for its features and flexibility, so I moved with my wife from Piedmont to South Tyrol to become part of the Würth Phoenix System Integration team as Technical Consultant. I spend my free time travelling, exploring my new neighborhood, or if I have to stay at home I binge-watch tv series.

Author

Gabriele Cecco

For several years I have been managing processes with trouble ticket systems. After having worked with some of those, EriZone impressed me for its features and flexibility, so I moved with my wife from Piedmont to South Tyrol to become part of the Würth Phoenix System Integration team as Technical Consultant. I spend my free time travelling, exploring my new neighborhood, or if I have to stay at home I binge-watch tv series.

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