Month: June 2022

Overview

It’s possible to connect to a Jira instance using Python, and it’s possible to connect to AWS Comprehend using Python. Therefor, it is possible to marry the two, and use Python to assess the sentiment of Jira issues. There are two caveats when it comes to using this script:

  1. The script assumes you can authenticate against Jira with Basic Web Authentication. If your organization uses Single Sign On, this script would need to be amended. 
  2. The script assumes you’re working with Jira Server or Datacenter.  If you’re using Jira Cloud the approach would be different, but I’m planning to do a post about that in the near future.

The authentication method below is not mine. I have linked to the Stack Overflow page where I found it, in the script comments.

 

The Script

The script starts with three imports. We need the Jira library, logging, and the AWS library (boto3).  You’ll likely need to a PIP install of Jira and boto3, if you’ve not used them before.

After the imports we’re defining client, which we use to interact with the AWS API.  Remember to change your region to whichever region is appropriate for you, in addition

…

As part of my grad school course work, I had half a dozen XML files with content that needed to be analyzed for sentiment.   AWS Comprehend is a service that analyzes text in a number of ways, and one of those is sentiment analysis.

My options were to either cut and paste the content of 400 comments from these XML files, or come up with a programmatic solution.  Naturally, I chose the latter.

The XML file is formatted like so:

 

         <posts>
          <post id="123456">
            <parent>0</parent>
            <userid>user id</userid>
            <created>timestamp</created>
            <modified>timestamp</modified>
            <mailed>1</mailed>
            <subject>Post title</subject>
            <message> Message content </message>

 

What I needed to get at was the message element of each post, as well as the post id.

The script imports BeautifulSoup to work with the XML, and boto3, to work with AWS.    We next define a string buffer, because we need to store the results of the analysis somehow.

Next we define the client, which tells AWS everything it needs to know.  Tell it the service you’re after, the AWS region, and the tokens you’d use to authenticate against AWS.

After that we provide a list of XML files that the script needs to parse, and tell it to

…

I found myself needing to examine issues that came through our Jira Service Desk workflow, to determine if they had a form attached. If they didn’t have a form attached, i.e. someone created the issue manually instead of through the Service Desk Portal, the workflow would be instructed to handle them in a certain way.

This turned out to be surprisingly difficult.  There’s no easily accessed attribute associated with issues in Jira that indicates whether or not they have a form attached.

In the end, I determined that it was possible to examine issues in this way by applying some JQL to them.

 import com.atlassian.sal.api.component.ComponentLocator
import com.atlassian.jira.component.ComponentAccessor
import com.atlassian.jira.jql.parser.JqlQueryParser
import com.atlassian.jira.web.bean.PagerFilter
import com.atlassian.jira.bc.issue.search.SearchService

def jqlQueryParser = ComponentAccessor.getComponent(JqlQueryParser)
def issueManager = ComponentAccessor.getIssueManager()
def searchService = ComponentLocator.getComponent(SearchService)
def user = ComponentAccessor.getJiraAuthenticationContext().getLoggedInUser()

def issue = issueManager.getIssueObject("<issue key>")
//Define an issue against which the script will be run

def queryParser = ComponentAccessor.getComponent(JqlQueryParser)
def query = queryParser.parseQuery('issueFormsVersion > 1 and key = '+ issue.key)
//Define the query parameters

def search = searchService.search(user, query, PagerFilter.getUnlimitedFilter())
//This gives us a list of issues that match the query

if(search.results.size() > 0){
    //Do something here
    //If any results were found, it means that the issue had a form attached
…