You are viewing documentation for Structure Server and Data Center version 5.6 and patch releases. For other versions, see Version Index or [Structure Cloud].
5th of June, 2019
Structure 5.4 adds Memo items, Status category column, the ability to track time in status and additional improvements and fixes.
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Try It: Structure Sandbox Server (no installation required)
The Time in Status column allows you to calculate how much time issues spend in specific statuses.
Time in Status can be customized and aggregated, depending on your business needs.
Documentation: Time in Status Column
Memo items work similar to folders within a structure, except that memos can include a choice of icons, color and text.
Memos can serve a variety of purposes within a structure:
Documentation: Memo
The Status category column allows you to see at a glance which Status category each issue is in. This can be extremely useful if different teams/projects use different workflows or custom statuses.
Structure 5.4 and all extensions support Jira versions 7.6 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 3.4–5.3. 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.
The upgrade procedure from versions 3.x–5.3 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 5.4 introduces two new features and a performance improvement important for large-scale Jira Server and Jira Data Center instances.
Jira has quite a lot of request-level caches that keep expensive data easily accessible for the duration of a single user request. These caches get cleared once the request completes, and since the absolute majority of requests are quick, there is usually no problem.
However, we have seen a few support cases in which an unusually long-running background task would make a Structure thread accumulate too much data in request caches, consuming excessive amounts of memory.
We are actively working to solve this problem, and in Structure 5.4 we introduce periodical cleaning of the JQL query literals cache, which is one of the caches susceptible to the problem. Further improvements in this area are planned for future Structure releases.
If you have large structures that take significant time to generate, we advise that you check their performance in a staging environment before upgrading.
The new Time in Status column is based on issue history data, so the values can be quite expensive to calculate. Our performance tests have shown that in the aggregate mode, it can be visibly slower than simple field-based columns in structures of 10,000 issues or more. If you are planning to use this column with large, deeply-nested structures, we advise that you check its performance on a staging system.
The new Memo item type is based on generic items, introduced in Structure 4.4. The data will be stored in the AO_8BAD1B_GENERIC_ITEM
table, which will contain one row for each memo item. Because the table has been introduced earlier, there are no schema updates in this release.
Memos may be slower when accessing structure via Chrome with the built-in spell checker enabled.
Apart from the suggestions above, there are no special areas of interest for load testing and stress testing Structure 5.4. We advise running the same testing procedures as you've done for previous upgrades.
Should you have any questions on Enterprise Deployment, let us know at support@almworks.com.