User

Backbone has multiple options for synchronizing user fields (such as assignee and reporter).

You don’t need to sync these fields. In that case, the following happens:

• Assignee: it depends on your Jira configuration if a default assignee will be set or the issue will stay unassigned.

• Reporter: the sync user will be the reporter of the issue

Required Permissions

The sync user needs the following permissions:

• Syncing assignee: the 'Assign Issues' permission

• Syncing reporter: the 'Modify Reporter' permission

User field synchronization options

There are different options available  to synchronize the field:

• The User Passthrough Mapping (by username) maps the user to a user in the partner instance with the same username.

• The User Passthrough Mapping (by email) maps the user to the partner instance with the same email address.

• The User Prefix Mapping lets you add or remove prefixes to the start of synchronized user values. This is helpful in cases where your organization has certain naming conventions for internal or external users. E.g. if you add the prefix 'INT-' to synchronized users, the user "John Doe" in Project A would appear as "INT-John Doe" in Project B.

• The User Correlation Mapping which maps a specific user to another specific user in the partner instance, also with a different username/email.

• The To Text Mapping maps a user into a text field.

Which Mapping should I use?

If you are synchronizing between Jira Server and Jira Cloud, we recommend to use the User Passthrough Mapping (by email) because Atlassian has removed usernames from Jira Cloud. For Jira Server to Jira Server synchronizations the User Passthrough Mapping (by username) is sufficient in most of the cases.

Synchronize a user field to a user with the same username

To synchronize a user to a user with the same username in the partner project, select the  User Passthrough Mapping (by username) option:

If the same user does not exist in the partner instance, Backbone will throw an error. In order to avoid this, you can set a fallback user – whenever a user does not exist in the partner project, the field will be set to this fallback user instead.

When Ignore empty values for this user field  is selected, empty user field values are not synchronized.

For example: user John Doe is synchronized as an assignee from Project A to Project B. Activating Ignore empty values for this user field  means that if John Doe is removed as assignee from Project A, Project B will ignore this because it is a change to an empty field, and John Doe will remain as the assignee in Project B.

Synchronize a user field to a user with the same email 

To synchronize a user to a user with the same email in the partner project, select  User Passthrough Mapping (by email) option:

If the same user does not exist in the partner instance, Backbone will throw an error. In order to avoid this, you can set a fallback user – whenever a user does not exist in the partner project, the field will be set to this fallback user instead.

In order to use this field mapping for synchronizations between Jira Server to Jira Cloud or Jira Cloud to Jira Cloud, please make sure that your users are sharing their email address with apps. Each user can change this setting in their profile and visibility settings of their Atlassian account.

Synchronize specific users to specific users 

To synchronize specific users to other specific users (for example, user 'Tom' in Project A to user 'Thomas' in Project B), select the User Correlation Mapping option.

In the User mapping section, click Add Entry to enter the users you want to map. The users are mapped according to the number they are assigned to – so the user assigned to number 1 on the left side will be synchronized to user 1 on the right side.

In case you are synchronizing a user that you haven't created a mapping for, you can set a default user for the field to be mapped to, otherwise Backbone will throw an error. You can do this using the Fallback User dropdown. The field value will automatically fall back to this user if the synced user is not mapped.

Synchronize a user field to a text field 

To synchronize the user field to a text field on the target side, you have to:

• select a user field on one side 

• select a text field on the other side

• set the synchronization direction from the user field to the text field
  

The mapping can only be unidirectional because Backbone doesn't support parsing the user field from the other instance.

After pressing the Configure button, you have to select To Text  on the left and Passthrough on the right.

You can also specify a display format for the text field, to do that you can enter your format string in the Custom User template text box:

You can use the following placeholders in the text string: