When a Collaboration Link is created, you can visualize it in the Issue Links area. They will be grouped by Collaboration Link type and they will include an icon and a title.
If you are entering Jira and you have not started yet a session with the OSLC Remote Application, you won't be able to see the actual
icon nor the preview of the remote artifact and, if private linking is enabled, not even its title. The preview is a shortened view of the artifact (just the most important properties are included)
that is displayed when you pass the mouse over the artifact link for a second [1], [2]. What you get hovering the artifact link without a session is a way to start it:
the message Log in to see the preview content. is displayed on a tooltip along with the artifact title. You can click on the Log in link embedded in the message,
or press the Log in button on the left of the link, to start the authentication/authorization process. If, on the other hand, the tooltip shows the message No preview available.,
means that there is no a friend application registered for this link and therefore, there is no way to get its preview; please contact an administrator to see whether is possible to register the friend.
Finally, if the tooltip displays the Couldn’t get more information. message, means something else is wrong, please contact an administrator to inform her/him of the problem.
Once the authentication/authorization process is completed, it is expected you see the actual artifact icon, title [3] and its preview by hovering it, but this will not be the case if the
OSLC Scheme Auto-Refresh feature is disabled, by a Jira server administrator, for the friend application to which the Collaboration link belongs. In this latter case, refreshing the icon
and title must be done manually by pressing either the Refresh button, located where the Log in button used to be, or the Refresh link in the artifact's tooltip.
Once this is done, the preview may still not be available if the following scenarios occur:
Once the link information is either manually or automatically refreshed, configured link attributes will be displayed, on the link title's right, as long as the Link Appearance feature
is not disabled by a Jira server administrator. A link attribute is a remote artifact's property configured to be displayed, by a Jira server administrator, along with the artifact's title once refreshed.
Remote applications can actually provide one or two previews known as small and large previews. As you may guess, they are intended to show less or more information but sometimes applications can decide to provide only one of them or even can decide to provide both but with no difference between the content. In any case, when both previews are available, the small preview will be displayed by default and a maximize button will appear just before the close icon on the top-right corner of the window. By pressing such icon you can switch between the small and large preview at your convenience.
If Jira issue is using a Global Configuration, the preview will correspond to the versioned artifact in that configuration. You can know which configuration is used by hovering the config/branch icon at the right of the link's row [5]. Now, if the remote artifact is removed, case is a bit different than before because the artifact could still exist in another configuration [6], thus a warning-link icon will be used instead of the error-link and the message hovering it will advise the user on this situation. Another case for using a warning-icon is when the issue is not using a Global Configuration but the Collaboration Link expects so; users may end up in this situation if they deliberately remove the Global Configuration association from the issue or they were using the creation dialog and ignored the warning about not finding a version mapped to the current Global Configuration used on the remote application. For this case, the hovering message will advise the user on how to set a Global Configuration.
It's worth to mention that these warning-link icons and hovering messages do not apply if the OSLC Remote Application is IBM Engineering Test Management, this application provides it's own icon (and hovering messages) for missing artifacts.