Visibility Scopes

Visibility scopes allow you to narrow down where a particular response template can be used. This can be particularly useful to declutter the list of templates, by limiting specific templates to specific projects.

You can define the visibility scope when creating or editing a template.

Templates currently support three levels of visibility scopes:

Global

Global templates can be seen, and inserted by every user in every project they have access to.

Only Jira Administrators are allowed to create, edit, or delete global templates.

Project Level

Project templates are tied to a single project. Only the users with access to that project can see or insert that template.

By default, Jira administrators and project administrators are the only users that can add, edit, or delete Project level templates. Regular users do not have permission to create project-wide templates. This can however be changed in the plugin settings.

Question: can a template be associated with multiple projects?

The short answer is: not yet. We have intentionally limited templates to be associated with a single project to avoid permissions conflicts. More specifically, imagine the following scenario:

A template is shared between 2 projects, but the current user only has access to one of those 2 projects. Now, that user tries to edit the template. We have to let the user know that this template is shared by multiple projects, but we cannot reveal the name of the second project, as that would be a permissions violation. Now this user lacks context as to where else the template is used, and might make changes that conflict with the other project.

To avoid this scenario, we have opted to limit templates to a single project until we can find a more graceful solution for this.

Personal

Personal templates are only accessible by the user that created them. Any user can create personal templates, and no other user, including Jira administrators, can see or use those templates.

Future scopes

Through our own usage of the app, we've realized that limiting visibility scopes based on high level entities like global and project level is not quite enough.

We're working on expanding the visibility scopes to support much more specific context such as user groups, and issue specific values. For example, we envision templates that only apply when an issue is of a certain type, or priority, or has a specific status.

The idea being that a response template for a new account request wouldn't necessarily apply to something like a bug report, or a technical support request.