You are viewing documentation for Structure Server and Data Center version 5.5 and patch releases. For other versions, see Version Index or [Structure Cloud].
16th of August, 2018
Structure 5.0 introduces Horizontal Scrolling, Manual Adjustments to auto-generated content, user interface updates and more.
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Manual Adjustments allow you to move dynamic content within a structure, regardless of the Automation used to create the structure.
When you use generators to build structures, you’re restricted in how you can move items within your structure, based on the generator rules. When Manual Adjustments are enabled, you can move items or create new items within your structure regardless of the generators used to create it.
Manual Adjustments are not reflected in Jira and may be affected by changes to your generators or Jira items.
Documentation: Manual Adjustments
Implementing Manual Adjustments required us to make changes to our backup file format. As such, previous versions of Structure will not be able to restore data from backup files created by Structure 5.0 and later. We strongly recommend that you back up your data before upgrading. For more information, see Backup Format Version Change.
To make it easier to work with multiple columns and/or larger column widths, you can now enable horizontal scrolling within your structure. When Horizontal Scrolling is enabled, you can add columns beyond the width of your viewing pane and navigate between columns using a convenient horizontal scrollbar.
Documentation: Horizontal Scrolling
The Work Logged column has been updated so time spent on an issue can now be calculated for a specific user, group, or project role.
Documentation: Work Logged Column
Automatic Structure Maintenance now supports flexible scheduling with crontab.
Using standard crontab formatting, you can customize your maintenance schedule to request that tasks run only on certain days or during certain times, process multiple backups each day, specify exact times down to the minute and more.
Documentation: Automatic Structure Maintenance
Other changes include:
Structure 5.0 and all extensions support Jira versions from 7.2 or later. All editions of Jira (Jira Core, Jira Software, Jira Service Desk) are supported. Jira Data Center is supported.
With respect to other add-ons and custom integrations, this release is backwards-compatible with Structure 3.4–4.6. Structure.Testy extension, Colors, Structure.Pages, Structure.Gantt and integrations with third-party apps should continue working normally.
If your Jira server does not have Structure yet, the installation is simple:
catalina.out
or jira-application.log
for log messages from Structure.If you're upgrading from version 2.11.2 or earlier, please read Structure 3.0.0 Release Notes.
Upgrade procedure from versions 3.x–4.6 is simple:
Install the new version of the plugin.
catalina.out
or jira-application.log
for warnings or errors.We strongly recommend that you back up your data before upgrading. The introduction of manual adjustments required changes to our backup file format, which makes previous versions of Structure unable to restore data from backup files created by Structure 5.0 and later. For more information, see Backup Format Version Change.
Structure 5.0 introduces the ability to manually adjust generated content and improves the performance of the Sub-Task extender. The changes in the Automation sub-system can be particularly important for larger installations and Jira Data Center instances.
Manual adjustments are disabled by default for new and existing structures, so they shouldn't immediately affect Structure's behavior and performance.
Structure's permission system is used to control who has access to manual adjustments:
Documentation: Structure Permissions, Changing Permission to Create New Structures.
In addition to permissions, there are configurable limits on the number of manual adjustments:
structure.gfs.manualAdjustments.maxAdjustmentsPerAction
structure.gfs.manualAdjustments.maxAdjustmentsPerStructure
Finally, manual adjustments can be disabled for the entire Jira instance by setting the structure.gfs.manualAdjustments.enable
system property to false
.
Documentation: Advanced Configuration with System Properties
We have added a new table named AO_8BAD1B_MANUAL_ADJUSTMENTS
to the database schema. This table stores primary data (not stored anywhere else in Jira).
The table contains one row for each structure with manual adjustments. The total amount of data stored depends on the number of adjustments and the complexity of the structure, however, a rough estimate would be on the order of 100 characters per adjustment.
The data from this table is exported along with other Structure data when you do Structure Backup in a human- and machine-readable form. The table is also exported along with all Structure data during Jira backup.
In Structure 5.0 we had to change the backup file format version due to the backwards-incompatible changes required by the introduction of manual adjustments. This means that previous versions of Structure will not be able to restore data from backup files created by Structure 5.0 and later. Because of this, we strongly recommend that you back up your data before upgrading.
However, if you want to downgrade to an earlier version, you can use the procedure outlined below to restore Structure data from a 5.0 backup file:
version
attribute in the <structure-backup>
element from "5.0" to "3.3".<manualAdjustments>
elements from the XML.Then you can restore directly from the modified XML file; you do not have to pack it into a ZIP archive.
The Sub-Task extender has to check whether each issue in its scope is a sub-task or a regular issue. Previous versions of Structure relied on JQL to perform issue type checks, and on large Jira instances with hundreds of issue types these JQL queries caused significant performance impact. In Structure 5.0 we have changed the Sub-Task extender to read issue types from the Lucene index directly, instead of using JQL. We have also improved caching, so sub-task extenders are now better able to reuse the results of issue type checks done by other sub-task extenders.
The introduction of manual adjustments required extensive changes throughout the Automation sub-system, so we advise you to perform load and stress testing in a staging environment before you upgrade. You can try the following scenarios:
Watch the log files for errors and warnings while running these experiments.
Should you have any questions on Enterprise Deployment, let us know at support@almworks.com.