Using Jira Expressions

Owned by Daniel Barrow
Last updated: Oct 06, 2023
2 min read

Introduction to Jira Expressions

Jira expressions can be used to evaluate custom code in the context of Jira entities. It’s a domain-specific language designed with Jira in mind, evaluated on Jira Cloud. Jira expressions follow JavaScript syntax, and can be thought of as a dialect of JavaScript. Jira expressions use a data model loosely inspired by Jira’s REST API JSON model. You can learn more about the various data types supported by Jira expressions here, and explore them interactively on the Data Types help tab of the Jira expression editor included in JMWE.

Jira expressions in JMWE for JIRA Cloud

Jira expressions in JMWE for Jira Cloud are used to insert information in various functions of JMWE, including:

You can insert issue, transition and current user information into the conditions using Jira expressions. 

Scripting features in Jira expressions

To learn more about Jira expressions:

Limitations of Jira expressions

Jira Cloud enforces the following stringent limitations while using Jira expressions. This section explains them in context to JMWE. For more information, see the official Jira expressions documentation.

  1. The expression's length is limited to 1,000 characters or 100 syntactic elements.

  2. Limitations inside the Jira expressions written by users: The expression can execute at most 10 expensive operations (expensive operations are those that load additional data, such as entity properties, comments, or custom fields). For example, A condition that checks for a version 1.0 on every issue linked to the current issue.

    issue.links.every(link => link.outwardIssue.versions.every(ver => (ver.name == "1.0")))

    Evaluation will fail if there are more than 10 linked issues.