JIRA Search plugin
March 26th, 2007 by HenI’ve released a Search plugin for JIRA. It was born of some confusion over just what the Quick Search feature was doing, but it still has value I think. It’s a simple thing to look at:
The exact problem we were hitting was that the Quick Search doesn’t like you searching for things that look like an issue key. When your JIRA is used to track other issue trackers, you find you want to search for ‘DBCP-23′ quite a lot and it’s frustrating to have to go onto the rather clunky Find Issues page. Using the Quick Search though will give you an ‘Issue does not exist’ page.
There are some other reasons. I’ve never liked the new users view of searching in JIRA. There’s a Quick Search textfield in the top-right, and a somewhat cryptic ‘Find Issues’ link on the top bar, but both are drowned out by the immediate content in front of the user and I think people don’t easily see either. There’s great value in having people able to do a text search on the front page (find previous bug report before reporting it), so I think this little plugin has great value in such places.
I’d like to enhance it so that people can customize it to look at custom fields, but that’s going to be a bit of work I suspect. JIRA tends to think AND instead of OR.