his tutorial walks through the steps necessary to crawl Jira using the Aspire 2.3-SNAPSHOT Jira connector.

Step 1: Launch Aspire and open the Content Source Management Page



Aspire Content Source Management Page

Launch Aspire (if it's not already running). See:

Browse to: http://localhost:50505. For details on using the Aspire Content Source Management page, please refer to UI Introduction.

Step 2: Add a new Jira Content Source



Add new source

To specify which Jira to crawl, we will need to create a new "Content Source".

To create a new content source:

  1. From the Aspire 2 Home page, click on "Add Source" button.
  2. Click on "Jira Connector".

Step 2a: Specify Basic Information



General Configuration Tab

In the "General" tab in the Add New Content Source window, specify basic information for the content source:

  1. Enter a content source name in the "Name" field.

    This is any useful name which you decide is a good name for the source. It will be displayed in the content source page, in error messages, etc.

  2. Click on the "Active?" checkbox to add a checkmark.

    Unchecking the "Active?" option allows you to configure content sources but not have them enabled. This is useful if the Jira instance will be under maintenance and no crawls are wanted during that period of time.

  3. Click on the "Schedule" drop-down list and select one of the following: Manually, Periodically, Daily, or Weekly.

    Aspire can automatically schedule content sources to be crawled on a set schedule, such as once a day, several times a week, or periodically (every N minutes or hours). For the purposes of this tutorial, you may want to select Manually and then set up a regular crawling schedule later.

  4. After selecting a Schedule type, specify the details, if applicable:
    1. Manually: No additional options.
    2. Periodically: Specify the "Run every:" options by entering the number of "hours" and "minutes."
    3. Daily: Specify the "Start time:" by clicking on the hours and minutes drop-down lists and selecting options.
    4. Weekly: Specify the "Start time:" by clicking on the hours and minutes drop-down lists and selecting options, then clicking on the day checkboxes to specify days of the week to run the crawl.
    5. Advance: Enter a custom CRON Expression (e.g. 0 0 0 ? * *)

Step 2b: Specify the Connector Information



Connector Configuration Tab

In the "Connector" tab, specify the connection information to Jira.

  1. Enter the url (protocol and server) of the Jira instance.

    For example https://searchtechnologies.atlassian.net

  2. Enter the username to connect to the server with
  3. Enter the user's password
  4. Specify the number of elements per page in the "Page Size" field, or leave it set to the default of 100 (maximum number).
  5. Include/Exclude patterns:

    If you want to specify include patterns, click on the 'add new' button for include patterns and specify the regex pattern. So Aspire will only crawl URLs with the specified pattern. If you want to specify exclude patterns, click on the 'add new' button for exclude patterns and specify the regex pattern. So Aspire will exclude crawling of URLs that matches the specified pattern.

Step 2c: Specify Workflow Information



Workflow Configuration Tab

In the "Workflow" tab, specify the workflow steps for the jobs that come out of the crawl. Drag and drop rules to determine which steps should an item follow after being crawled. This rules could be where to publish the document or transformations needed on the data before sending it to a search engine. See Workflow for more information.

  1. For the purpose of this tutorial, drag and drop the Publish To File rule found under the Publishers tab to the onPublish Workflow tree.
    1. Specify a Name and Description for the Publisher.
    2. Click Add.

After completing this steps click on the Save button and you'll be sent back to the Home Page.

Step 3: Initiate the Full Crawl

Now that everything is set up, actually initiating the crawl is easy.

  1. Go to the Aspire Admin page (http://localhost:50505/aspire/files/home.html), you can see the new Jira connector.
  2. Make sure connector is active.
  3. Click on start button to start the crawl. The StartFull.png button will start a full crawl, the StartIncr.png button will start an incremental crawl (the first time this will work like a full crawl. After the first crawl, use the StartIncr.png button (incremental) to crawl for any changes done in the repository.
  4. Now connector will crawl the whole Jira repository. It may take a minute or two for Aspire to connect to the content source and begin feeding the content.

Note that connector will be automatically initiated by the scheduler based on the schedule you specified for the connector, be it once a day, once a week, every hour, etc. But you can always start a crawl at any time by clicking on the "Start" button.

Aspire 2.0 running content source

During the Crawl

During the crawl, you can do the following:

  1. Click on the "Refresh" button on the Content Sources page to view the latest status of the crawl.

    The status will show RUNNING while the crawl is going, and CRAWLED when it is finished.

  2. Click on "Complete" link on your connector to view the number of documents crawled so far, the number of documents submitted, and the number of documents with errors.



Aspire 2.0 content source statistics

If there are errors, you will get a clickable "Error" flag that will take you to a detailed error message page.

Step 4: Initiate an Incremental Crawl

If you only want to process content updates from Jira (items which are added, modified, or removed), then click on the "Incremental crawl” button. The Jira connector will automatically identify only changes which have occurred since the last crawl.

If this is the first time that the connector has crawled, the "incremental" crawl does the same thing as the "Full" crawl. Both will crawl the entire content source and submit all documents. Thereafter, if you click on “Incremental crawl” button and it will only crawl updates.

Scheduled crawls are always "Incremental” crawls. This means that the first scheduled job will perform a "Full" crawl, and jobs after that will perform "update" crawls. Statistics are reset for every crawl.

Statistics are reset for every crawl.


Group Expansion

Group expansion configuration is done on the "Advanced Connector Properties" of the Connector tab.

  1. Click on the Advanced Configuration checkbox to enable the advanced properties section.
  2. Scroll down to Group Expansion and click the checkbox.
  3. Set the Jira url, user name and password of Jira repository.
  4. Set an schedule for group expansion refresh and cleanup.


Limitations

  1. When retrieving permissions for items such as issues, it is not possible to get permissions with groups. So ACLs always have only users without groups. This is due to a limitation on Jira REST API.


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