YouTrack
Powerful project management for all your teams
YouTrack Now With Workflow Constructor
YouTrack 2021.4 makes automation easy with the new Workflow Constructor, a drag-and-drop visual editor that lets you create workflows without writing a single line of code. Other updates include user access management improvements, new Mailbox Integration features, a new domain for YouTrack InCloud users, and the ability to embed Figma designs and Google calendars in tasks, comments, and articles.
Workflows in a nutshell
Workflows are automation scripts that can update, create, and delete issues based on rules that you define. They can limit the changes that users can make to issues, and they can carry out additional actions like displaying alerts or sending notifications. Check out this blog post for more details on the basic concepts.
In earlier versions of YouTrack, you could only create or edit workflows if you had a good understanding of JavaScript. This was great while our users were mostly software developers, but now that we have a rapidly growing non-technical audience we decided to introduce a visual editor – the Workflow Constructor.
Workflow Constructor
With the new visual Workflow Constructor, even non-technical team members can easily set up their own workflows to automate repetitive tasks and enforce established processes.
The constructor lets you create workflows with rules that are triggered in one of three ways: when an issue is updated, at specified times, or when an action is applied. Every workflow rule consists of prerequisites (conditions that must be met in order for the workflow to run) and actions that the workflow will carry out.
The Workflow Constructor includes a selection of prerequisites and actions that cover most of the typical use cases. Let us know if there are any that are missing – we’re eager to hear your feedback!
Example workflow
To give you an idea of what you can do with the new Workflow Constructor, here’s a simple “out of the office” workflow to reassign issues that are assigned to someone who’s unavailable between certain dates.
.gif)
- Drag the “Issue is created within a specific time frame” condition onto the Prerequisites canvas and enter the dates when the person will be unavailable.
Next, add a “Field matches specified criteria” condition, set the Field to “Assignee” and Mode to “is”, and in the Value field specify the person who is unavailable. - Now drag the “Update the value in a field” action to the Actions canvas and set it to update the Assignee field to reassign these issues to another user.
- You can also notify the creator of the issue about the reason for reassigning their issue. You could add a comment to the issue, show a notification message, send an email, or do all of the above, just to be sure!
Our documentation contains everything you need to know to get started with the Workflow Constructor.
New workflow debugger
We’ve added a workflow debugger to the YouTrack IDE plugin to help you troubleshoot and fix errors in Workflow Constructor and JavaScript workflows. The debugger lets you pause the execution of workflows and step through them to examine the data contained in issue fields and check whether you’ve expressed conditions correctly.
Table of contents in Knowledge Base articles
Knowledge Base articles now display a navigable table of contents that is automatically generated from headings in the article text. You can choose to display or hide the table of contents using a toggle button at the top right-hand corner of each article.
Embed Figma designs and Google calendars
You can now embed Figma designs and fully interactive Google calendars in issues, articles, and comments. Just paste the link to a Figma design or the publicly shareable URL of a Google calendar into the Embed Link field:
The publicly shareable URL for a Google calendar can be found in the gearwheel menu | Settings | Public URL to this calendar. Check out the documentation for more information about embedding content from external sources.
The embedded content will appear when you save your issue or article or publish your comment.
New youtrack.cloud domain for YouTrack InCloud
We’ve introduced a new domain, youtrack.cloud, for all newly registered YouTrack InCloud instances. Existing InCloud customers with the old yourcompany.myjetbrains.com/youtrack address format can migrate to yourcompany.youtrack.cloud by following these instructions. Instance names are unique across both domains, so nobody else can register your instance name.
Updated Due Date Calendar widget for Dashboards
You can now drag and drop tasks on the Due Date Calendar widget to change their due dates.
Reports based on links between issues
You can now specify issue link types as axes in the Issues per two fields and Issues per arbitrary field reports. You can use this in the Issues per two fields report, for example, to create a report displaying issues sorted by the number of subtasks or dependent issues that are linked to them, with a color-coded chart that communicates the priority of each linked issue. This can help you identify and focus on issues that need extra attention.
Import from Zendesk and monday.com
We’ve added scripts to let you migrate or continuously import content from Zendesk and monday.com to YouTrack.
You can import tickets from Zendesk together with custom fields, comments, attachments, and users. The monday.com script imports boards as projects and items as tasks, together with fields, field history, votes, tags, comments, attachments, users, and teams.
Mailbox Integration enhancements
YouTrack InCloud users can now create an instancename@youtrack.cloud email address to use with the YouTrack Mailbox Integration. In situations where you can’t have an IMAP connection, you can instead forward emails to your InCloud email address.
You can now add a customizable “Reply above this line” delimiter to email notifications. This helps the Mailbox Integration parse incoming email messages and identify the text of a user’s reply more reliably. You can configure the delimiter in Projects | Gearwheel menu | Settings | Notifications.
For the full technical details about this release, please refer to the Release Notes. To learn more about configuring the new features, visit the documentation.
If you use YouTrack InCloud, your instance will automatically be upgraded to YouTrack 2021.4 in accordance with our Maintenance Calendar. If you have an active Standalone subscription, you can download YouTrack 2021.4 today. If you don’t already have a license, you can use the free trial to try out the new version for yourself before you commit! For more information about the licensing options available for YouTrack, please visit our Buy page.
We truly appreciate all your feedback, so please share it with us in the comments section below. Please get in touch with our support if you have any questions – we’re always here to help!
Your YouTrack team
Subscribe to YouTrack Blog updates
