I’m working on building a custom dashboard widget for Jira that needs to include visual charts and support for importing external data sources. The widget should be able to display this imported data within the chart component.
I’ve been following the official Atlassian developer guides but I’m struggling with a few key areas. First, I can’t find clear instructions on how to implement chart functionality - I suspect it might use jQuery but I’m not very experienced with that library. Second, I’m having trouble understanding how to retrieve data directly from Jira’s internal systems. I’ve looked at the Java API interfaces but haven’t been able to get them working properly.
Does anyone know of better learning resources, sample widget code, or can provide guidance on getting started with this type of development?
I built custom Jira widgets with charts last year - the Atlassian Connect framework docs are pretty incomplete. You’ll want to use Jira’s REST API with authenticated requests instead of trying to hit the internal Java APIs directly. Chart.js works great for this since it plays nice with Jira’s UI and handles responsive design out of the box. The biggest pain points are managing auth tokens and transforming Jira’s API responses into chart-friendly formats. Honestly, the Atlassian Developer Community forum helped way more than the official docs for actual implementation stuff. Just make sure you test with big datasets early - performance tanks fast if you’re not careful.
I had the same struggle building custom Jira widgets. Skip jQuery for charts - use Chart.js or D3.js instead. They work way better with Jira’s framework and have decent docs. The game-changer for me was realizing you can’t hit the Java API directly from widgets. You need Jira’s REST API endpoints. Start with basic GET requests to /rest/api/2/ to grab issue data, then convert it to whatever format your chart library wants. The Atlassian Connect docs have some hidden examples that helped me more than their main guides. Quick heads up - check if your company allows third-party libraries before you pick a charting solution. Some enterprise setups block them.