Managing Collaboration Links

Out of the box, a Jira issue can be linked to other issues, Confluence pages, or external web pages. Once OSLC Connect for Jira is installed (and configured), another kind of links can be created: Collaboration Links. These links relate the issue with ALM applications' artifacts (the OSLC Remote Application artifacts). The link relationship is determined by the Collaboration Link type and these are determined by the remote project associations.

If no errors occurred, or all failed results are discarded, the Link dialog is closed, then the created link will be visible in the Issue Links area. Once a single issue link is created (not necessarily a Collaboration Link), you will be able to start the Link dialog, from the Issue Links section, by pressing on the plus icon located at the top-right corner of the section. If the link created is a Collaboration Link, you can create more links of the same type, by dragging and dropping remote artifacts on the Collaboration Link type section.

Removing a Collaboration Link.

1. In the Issue Links area, choose the specific link you want to remove.
2. Click on the cross icon displayed at the end of the link row.
3. Complete the remote authentication/authorization process if required.
4. On the remove confirmation dialog, click the Delete button.

If everything went ok, the dialog will be closed, the link is removed from the system, and it will no longer appear in the Issue Links area. If, on the other hand, you see the Failed to remove the back link dialog, please contact your administrator in order to check the communication with the OSLC Remote Application, or any other issue before continuing. At this point, the safest is to click on the Cancel button and wait for a resolution.

Updating a Collaboration Link.

Global Configurations Compatibility

The current GC is determined by the following steps/settings:

1. The Link Type.
   This is the link type to create chosen in the scoping step.
2. The Version Field associated with the Link Type.
   All link types are associated, by the project administrator, to either the Affects Version/s or the Fix Version/s field.
3. The Version set on the issue's Version Field.
   The last Version value set in the corresponding Version Field of the linking issue.
4. The GC associated to the set Version.
   The project administrator associates project Versions with actual GC's.

Users can track these settings, with actual values for their linking issue, by clicking in the branches icon next to the GC title. It's worth mentioning that this GC resolution process is not performed only within the linking wizard, it's the same procedure taking effect when displaying Collaboration links created already, this means:

• The GC for the created issues is determined on the fly depending on the settings above.
• Beware of changing an issue version when working with GCs, this is broken-links prone.
• Different link types of the same issue can reference/use different GC's.

Last but not least, what occurs when a Jira issue is set to work with a Global Configuration but requires linking with artifacts of projects that don't? The answer depends on the remote project and its level of Configuration Management support. Applications not being compatible at all may just ignore the context information sent by Jira and the linking will work. Others, like IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Next, where Configuration Management can be supported but it's actually disabled, will deny the linking; so all will depend on the remote application accepting or not the linking.