Behaviours

Before you start

What are Behaviours?

Behaviours give you added control over fields in Jira. A field configuration customizes how fields behave across an instance. However, a behaviour in ScriptRunner for Jira Cloud allows you to take that field customization further, defining how fields behave for issues in a given project or issue context.

Behaviours provide options enabling you to customize how fields in Jira behave. Therefore, you can give your users clear direction when filling in fields on the Create Behaviour screen. For example, you may want to create a behaviour that hides a field for a specific user group until it's relevant for them to interact with that particular field. 

You can create a behaviour that will:

• Prefill/preformat a template when an issue is created so users can easily follow it.

• Change the name or description that is displayed for a field.

• Hide or show a supported field only to people in a specific role.
  

  Hidden fields

  Note that hidden fields can still be submitted if a user edits the HTML form or modifies browser requests. 
• Set a field value based on another supported field.

Behaviour Scripts

Some points worth noting about behaviour scripts: 

• The language used when writing the logic for behaviour scripts is Javascript and not Groovy. You can refer to our scripting information for more details.
• ScriptRunner can store up to 50,000 characters in scripts associated with a Behaviour. This includes the sum of all characters in all scripts in a single behaviour after compiling from TypeScript to JavaScript, plus our metadata. For more information, see data the POST request in Atlassian's documentation.
• Complex scripts may affect the speed at which your behaviours run and may be slower than simple or efficient scripts.
• There is a limit of 3000 behaviours at this time. 

How to use Behaviours

Behaviours in ScriptRunner for Jira Cloud can be used to reinforce your business processes. It's beneficial to think of a behaviour as one of your business rules or use cases and understand that it will only affect fields on projects and issue types specified by you.

Within the behaviours feature, you can choose to change or alter one or more fields. These are known as affected fields and are essential to initiate a behaviour. As such, they must be defined from the outset and are mandatory. Additionally, it is essential to determine the timing of when the script on the affected field should run: when the create screen first loads or when a change has been made to another supported field.