Last Friday, we released version 1.5.1. This version centers on some improvements for dashboards, especially making their export more robust.

With the rest of object types (custom fields, schemes, workflows,…) the general approach when exporting is that a missing reference will stop the export with an error message. Then the user (a JIRA admin) would fix that problem in the original configuration and retry the export. However, this approach may not be very convenient with dashboards. Dashboards are created by individual JIRA users and having to fix many problems in their configurations can be a very heavy burden on any JIRA admin. Things are even less convenient if the dashboards are private.

Most of these problems in dashboards have appeared so far with user preferences in gadgets. So the solution shipped with version 1.5.1 is based on:

• Ignoring the problem when JIRA ignores it (custom fields used as columns to display in some gadgets)

• Leaving the problem to the end user: the gadget is exported with all valid user preferences and marked as “not configured”. After it has been loaded into another instance, when a user tries to display that gadget, JIRA will show it in “edit” mode and the user will have a chance to fix the broken reference.

This solution is explained here. A very interesting discussion on the problems arising when exporting dashboards with broken configurations can be found in the comments following issue PCP-259.