In JIRA Cloud, support for user search is limited, as the JIRA Cloud REST API only allows you to search for users by username.
We’ve heard regular feedback from developers about the different situations where they need to search for users, but are unable to.
JQL would be the ideal solution for this. It is one of the best-loved and most powerful features in JIRA, due to its flexibility and the familiar SQL-like syntax. However, currently JQL can only be used to search for issues.
Today, we’d like announce that we’re addressing these problems with the introduction of a new API that brings the power of JQL to user search. You can use the same JQL-like structures and syntax, but the API will return user results.
What you can do today
We have implemented a new REST resource that supports searching for users that are assignees or reporters of specific issues or any issues in a project. A few examples:
| Query | Users returned |
| is assignee of PROJ-1 | assignee of the issue PROJ-1 |
| is assignee of (PROJ-1, PROJ-2) | assignee(s) of the issues PROJ-1 and PROJ-2 |
| is assignee of PROJ | user(s) that are assignees of at least one issue in project PROJ |
| is reporter of (PROJ-1, PROJ-2) | reporter(s) of the issues PROJ-1 and PROJ-2 |
Potential roadmap
We’re highly interested in adding additional capabilities based on what will be most useful to your add-ons and integrations. These are some of the possibilities for future development that we’ve thought of so far:
- support for commenters, reporters, and user picker fields
- search for users with specific entity property values
- support for ORDER BY clauses (order by user creation time, username, etc)
- support for workflow conditions and validators based on expressions (example: only people returned by a certain expression are allowed to execute a transition)
- admin page to search and perform bulk actions on users: add to group, send email, or export to a file
- saved searches
Looking for feedback
This feature is in beta and will be turned on upon request. If you’d like to know more and have this enabled on your JIRA instance, feel free to use this google form.
We are at the initial stages of developing this API. Let us know what you think. Is this useful? Have you been looking for better ways to search for users in your add-ons? Share your thoughts on our ecosystem community!