Structure 4.6.5 Release Notes
13th of June 2018
Structure 4.6.5 adds compatibility with Jira 7.10 and several performance improvements.
Download from Archive
Structure on the Atlassian Marketplace
1. Patch Release
This is a patch release based on Structure 4.6.3. (There was no 4.6.4 release.)
Starting with this version, Structure is compatible with Jira 7.10.
There are two known issues:
- We are still working on making Structure's user interface match the new look and feel of Jira 7.10. The app is perfectly usable, but you can still see some older-style controls. We are planning to complete the redesign in the next feature version.
- Archiving a project, which is now possible with Jira 7.10 Data Center edition, will cause all archived issues to disappear from all structures. See Archived Projects and Structure for details.
This upgrade is recommended for all large instances. Depending on Structure usage, this release may greatly improve Structure performance – specifically, reducing the time it takes to load structures with automation based on Portfolio or Jira links. The improvement is especially noticeable on larger instances with a large number of projects.
This upgrade is required for instances running Jira 7.10.
You need a Structure license with active maintenance (expiring no earlier than June 13th, 2018) to upgrade.
2. Installation
If your Jira server does not have Structure yet, the installation is simple:
- Download and install the Structure add-on, either from Atlassian Marketplace or from the Download page.
- When the Add-on Manager reports a successful installation, click Get Started to visit a page with important guidance for the Jira administrator. You may also want to check out the user's Get Started page, available under the "Structure" top-level menu.
- Monitor
catalina.out
orjira-application.log
for log messages from Structure.
3. Upgrade
If you are upgrading from version 2.11.2 or earlier, please read Structure 3.0.0 Release Notes.
The upgrade procedure from versions 3.x and 4.x is simple:
- Consider backing up Jira data, using Administration | System | Backup System. Starting from version 3.0.0, Structure data can be backed up together with Jira data. (If you have a large instance and have proper backup strategy in place, you may skip this step.)
Install the new version of the plugin.
- Monitor
catalina.out
orjira-application.log
for warnings or errors.
4. Enterprise Deployment Notes
Structure 4.6.5 has a few performance improvements especially important for large Jira instances with hundreds and thousands of projects.
When Structure is enabled only for certain Jira projects, generators have to make sure that they are adding issues only from those projects. Structure relied on JQL to perform project checks, producing JQL queries with clauses like: project IN (<list of selected project IDs>)
. On large Jira instances with thousands of projects and hundreds of those projects using Structure, these JQL queries cause significant performance impact, especially when run very often by Portfolio, Link, and Agile extenders.
In Structure 4.6.5, we have changed the project checking code to read project IDs from Lucene index directly, instead of using JQL. We have also improved caching, so generators are now better able to reuse the results of project checks done by other generators. We have seen significant performance improvements with these changes in the scenario described above.
The changes affect Portfolio, Link, and Agile extenders and, to a lesser extent, JQL, Agile, and Text Query inserters. If you have large structures (about 10,000 issues or more) built using these generators, we advise you to perform load and stress testing on a staging environment before upgrading, even if your Jira instance doesn't have a lot of projects.