Connect’s general pages will be part of the Jira SPA shell

This post provides additional communication relating to the rollout of changes announced in previous topics (Connect in SPA invitation and General pages in SPA).

What is changing?

Connect apps can take advantage of the general pages module in order to contribute an iframe that consumes an entire Jira page aside from template artifacts such as navigation, footer, etc. For improved user experience, we are introducing general pages into Jira’s single page application (SPA) shell. This means users will be able to navigate between SPA locations which will soon include general pages.

Most apps will not need to be modified to accommodate these changes, however, the changes are complex and there is a risk of impacting some apps.

Why is this changing?

This feature will improve the perceived and actual performance of navigating to general pages. It is part of our initiative to improve user experience. During our testing phase we were able to improve the time to interactive (TTI) by almost 1 second.

When will this change take effect?

It is critical for us to coordinate the release process with our Ecosystem partners to mitigate this risk. Previous soaking on app developer testing tenants has taken place a few times already - General pages in SPA - #2 by jbevan and Connect in SPA invitation.

We plan to gradually release the SPA general pages feature to customers starting on May 18, 2020. The rollout will occur on a tenant by tenant basis which means that during the rollout, apps will see both the new and old behaviours.

Testing your app

Changes around the context and size of the window have been made, and therefore verification of JavaScript API should be performed. To test your app:

  1. Enrol a test tenant into the Cloud Vendor First Release Group by visiting Jira Cloud: Developer-First Rollouts for Ecosystem App Developers.
  2. Install your app in the test tenant and test all features relating to general pages.
  3. If you see any anomalies, please make changes to the app, ensuring they work for non-SPA and SPA behaviours.
  4. Please share any learnings about changes you had to make with the developer community.
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Hi @BartoszGryta ,

We are facing an issue with our App , where by the General Page is not re-loading when the web-item link is clicked. I am not sure if this issue is related to the changes brought in by the new Navigation UI or its related to this topic.

Could you please provide me the side-effects on Connect Apps which use Url hashbang for their routes. Our implementation uses Angularjs (SPA)

1 Like

Hi @ajay,

Thanks for raising this issue. Could you please verify if it is related to WebItem url not work on jira service desk - #11 by AdolfoEloy? When did issues appear first? Could you please provide exact steps to reproduce?

Hi @BartoszGryta,

The WebItem url not work on jira service desk
references to “jira.project.sidebar.plugins.navigation” which is not being used in our App.

In our case the web-item is located within a custom web-section

      {
        "key": "view26-nav-menu-item-manage-view",
        "location": "view26-global-nav-main-link/view26-global-nav-main-menu",
        "name": {
          "value": "Manage views"
        },

Steps to reproduce the issue.
a) Install the Cloud version of the App from Marketplace
b) Create a sample View
c) Click on the “Manage View” webItem to go to home page. This was working earlier.

Hi @ajay, thanks for providing steps to reproduce. I will look into it and let you know when I find out something more.

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Hi @KamilRichert ,

Thanks ! Do let me know if you have any updates.

Cheers

Hi @ajay, sorry for the late reply. I examined this case and here’s what I found: it is related to the change in the moving connect application to the one-page Jira’s single page application (SPA). The SPA links in whole Jira work in such a way that based on the router link we show the correct view, so if we are on the right page nothing happens when you click the navigation link. In summary, it is intentional behaviour that SPA transitions do not reload the page after clicking the link.

Hi @KamilRichert

Thanks for the analysis. Since its a intentional behaviour , we will make changes in our App to accomodate the SPA behaviour.

Cheers

1 Like