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Customising templates with visual builder

Customising templates with visual builder

Introduction

Templates can be customized with the help of the following elements -

 

 

  1. Static text - This is the text that is rendered as it is in the final release notes document generated by ARNR

  2. Output variables - These are some of the important data points regarding different Jira entities such as Project, Version, User & so on. These are replaced with actual values at the time of final release notes document generation

  3. Custom variables - Read Customizing release notes content | (Output) Variables

  4. JQL sections - These are the configurable sections that determine which Jira issues are pulled into the final release document, what attributes (default as well as custom) for those issues are included & how the result should be laid out. This is the gist of ARNR’s template visual builder

  5. Stats & charts - These are almost similar to the JQL sections, the only difference being they end up showing a number of instead of actual Jira issues

Output variables

In order to make the templates generic, output variables are used. The majority of these output variables are available across all template types, however, there are a few that will be specific to a given template type.

Relevant information is highlighted at the appropriate places below -

List of supported output variables

Users
userName
userEmail

Project
projectName
projectld
projectKey

Version
version Name
versionDesc
release Date
versionld
versionURL
startDate

Sprint
sprintName
sprintId
sprintGoal
sprintStartdate
sprintEnddate
sprintCompletedate
sprintState

Date & Time
timestamp
currentDate
currentDatetime

Confluence
confluence URL

releasePageURL (only available in Release page notification and LinkedIn announcement template type)

Above variables are available in below template types & fields -

  • Email

    • Email subject

    • Email body

  • PDF

    • Content

  • MS Word

    • Word content

  • Confluence

    • Page title

    • Page content

  • JSON

    • Content

  • HTML

    • Content

  • Markdown

    • Content

  • JSM announcement

    • Announcement subject

    • Announcement message

  • LinkedIn announcement

    • Announcement subject

    • Announcement message

    • URL title and description

  • MS Word

    • File name

    • MS Word content

  • MS PowerPoint

    • File name

    • JQL sections

JQL section

JQL section is the core of ARNR release notes templates. Each JQL section represents a group of issues in Jira. Within the JQL section, you can provide additional configurations for each of the results.

We tweak Jira’s JQL a bit in ARNR, so that it supports input variables such as [versionId], [versionName], [projectId], [sprintId], [sprintName]. You can always increase the number of input variables by simply appending 1, 2 & so on to their names.

e.g. if you need to create a template that generates release notes from 3 versions, simply use the following input variables in the JQL - [versionId], [versionId1], [versionId2]. In this case, the template can accept 3 different versions as inputs.

Read more about the possibilities of JQL here.

There are a few variants of the JQL section. All of those are explained below. Variant 1 is the most common one.

Stats

Read more here - Stats & charts