Dynamic due dates in a Jira issue - no add-ons

[Roberta]

Hi all,

We are trying to set up due date dynamically upon creation of an Issue. For example, now + 30 days or 3rd Thursday of April, etc.

We don't have any specific add-on right now. Any suggestions that wouldn't require spending money would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Roberta

[Andy Heinzer · Accepted solution]

Hi Roberta,

I understand you are looking for a free solution that would let you automatically set the Due date upon issue creation in Jira.  As you have found, this is not something that Jira can do out of the box natively.   There was a suggestion request for a post function in Jira to do this over in https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-39346 However this was closed as something Jira won't be planning to implement any time soon.

I found a number of other posts on community about this problem.  There are lots of plugins that can help here. The highest viewed/voted on I found was this one:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Core-questions/How-do-I-automatically-set-the-Due-Date-of-an-issue-via-a/qaq-p/441125

In it, Sam Hall suggested 3 different plugins that can do this.  However since he posted this in 2017, I know that the Suite Utilities Plugin he mentions has become a paid plugin (previous versions were free). Which leaves us without a clear free solution.

I thought perhaps this could be something done with a slick javascript.  I found a similar thread in https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Duedate-default-value-when-creating-issue/qaq-p/290479

Which Ihor provides an interesting javascript that can set the due date for today's day when created.  I played around with this and it works to set the date to today's date for that field.  However I found that it's a lot more complicated to accurate increment that javascript by exactly 30 days.  Javascript has some interesting ways of handling dates in the native functions.  Simply adding a value of 30 to the day value does not correctly increment dates. So that script is just fine for setting a date of today.  But it fails to be useful in it's current state for your use case here.  I thought I might have found a solution, but the changing of months, leap year accounting, and changing of years that is possible when incrementing by 30 days would require you to take a date convert to another date format, increment the days correctly, and then convert back.  Sadly, I have not figured out how to do this well with Javascript alone.  It might be possible to do with javascript alone, but I fear that the script will have to be rather long to correctly add exactly 30 days to the current date at the time of creation. Unfortunately, I have not found a good free solution yet for your use case. 

It could be possible to create a plugin that would help you do this, but that could be even more effort that hacking away at this with a javascript.  I will try to work on this some more, but I'm not sure this is something that will be feasible to do in javascript alone. 

[Fadoua]

@Roberta 

DO you mean like a scheduler to create a ticket for you same than one already created on a specific date?

Best,

Fadoua

[Roberta]

Hi Fadoua,

We already have a scheduler add-on. What we want to do is to set due date 1 month after the creation of the ticket. Or set due date on the third Thursday of the month. The scheduler set the creation date but not the due date as we need.

Let me know if you have any ideas.

Thanks,

Roberta

[Roberta]

What we want to do is upon creation of an issue, we want to specify the due date as relative date. Currently, it seems that either you configure your field to be relative or a date picker, and you cannot toggle between the two. For example, our due date field is set to be a date picker and I can't specify in the field "now+4d" or "created_date +20d". 

I saw a couple of enhancement tickets that were submitted in the Atlassian Community by users asking for the ability to specify a relative due date and display the actual date (which is exactly what we need), but it seems that Atlassian hasn't given much attention to this.

Thanks,

Roberta

[Fadoua]

Ah ok I see @Roberta 

Let me tag Atlassian people here see what they have to say @Andy Heinzer and @Eaniel Deads 

Best,

Fadoua

[Roberta]

Thank you @Fadoua 

[George Villagaray]

For those folks that end up here via google, 99% of JIRA functionality is available out of the box, yes there's a marketplace, however you can do almost anything out of the box.

Finding someone to assist for free is the challenge, most everyone will try to sell you their code instead.

[mb]

This seems very easily possible by Jira Automation.

So no 3rd-party plugin will be needed.