5.1.4.8. Issue Annotations

The Issue Annotations feature allows for annotating issues and thus creating customized review and issue handling workflows. Issue annotations are mainly Tags and Comments that can be attached to issues after the analysis is completed.

The Issue View showing annotations

In the Issue View sidebar there is an annotations panel that can be used to associate plain text Comments and more importantly Tags with issues. These Tags can later be used as a filter criterion in the Issue Table.

Note

In order to see issue annotations the corresponding project-specific permission is required. In order to also be able to change Tags or write Comments another project-specific permission is required. There are 2 more related permissions, one that allows to create new tags and also gives access to the Tag Management and another that allows to delete the Comments of other users.

The Issue Table showing some tagged issues

Beside filtering by an issue Tag or a combination of multiple Tags, in the Issue Table it is also possible to select multiple issues and add or remove one or more tags to or from all of them at once using the leftmost column and the hamburger menu in its header.

Caution

It is possible for issue annotations to get lost in case of analysis configuration errors, as the logic that connects found issues with previously found ones cannot know, whether an issue was not found because of configuration changes or whether it was actually resolved. In case of accidental configuration changes it is thus sometimes better to delete bad analysis versions.

Manage Issue Tags

On the Tag Management page you can configure the Issue Tags available for a project if you have the corresponding permission for a project. Besides creating and deleting you can also rename tags, change their color and add a description.

The Tag Management Page of a Project

There also is a button linked issues for every tag that allows you to jump to the Issue Table filtered by occurrences of the tag in the most recent version. Note, that this issue list will not necessarily show you all tagged issues, as there may be issues with the tag that aren’t active in the most recent version any more.

Additionally, it is possible to automatically delete unused tags, i.e. tags that aren’t attached to any issue in the project, via the Delete Unused button.

Linking with JIRA Issues

If configured, there also exists a special annotation type that allows linking Dashboard and JIRA issues in a two way manner, i.e. the Dashboard issue will link to the JIRA issue and vice versa.

Depending on how the JIRA integration was configured by the Dashboard Administrator, it may be necessary for a Dashboard user to create a JIRA Access Token before it is possible to create such links. This JIRA Access Token will be stored with the Dashboard configuration and is only usable by the Dashboard User that created it. The Dashboard User Interface will guide users through that process.

The Issue Annotations Panel with active JIRA integration

Once set up, the Issue Annotations panel can be used to link with existing JIRA issues and it also provides a shortcut to simplify the creation of new JIRA issues from an existing Dashboard issue. After creation, new JIRA issues still need to be linked manually.

Disabling Issue Annotations

Administrators can disable the Issue Annotations feature per project and also configure whether newly added projects shall have the feature enabled initially.

With the feature disabled, the corresponding Tags columns will disappear from the Issue Table and the Annotations Panel will disappear from the Issue View.