13th of June 2018

Structure 4.6.5 adds compatibility with Jira 7.10 and several performance improvements.

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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:

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:

  1. Download and install the Structure add-on, either from Atlassian Marketplace or from the Download page.
  2. 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.
  3. Monitor catalina.out or jira-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:

  1. 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.)
  2. Install the new version of the plugin.

  3. Monitor catalina.out or jira-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.

Should you have any questions on Enterprise Deployment, let us know at support@almworks.com.