Create a multi-language support desk experience with ScriptRunner

If you’re a company working with multiple languages, offering your end users a support experience in their preferred language should be a priority.

One of the most common setups for organisations providing IT support is done using Atlassian’s Jira Service Management (formerly known as Jira Service Desk) and Confluence, where Confluence acts as a knowledge base. The problem with this basic setup is that while users can adjust the language from the settings page in Jira Service Management and Confluence, the transition is not seamless and needs to be done in each application individually.

Imagine you are a Portuguese user while your software is in English. You navigate from your company’s website to your support portal to try and find a solution to a login issue you are experiencing. You switch the language on Jira Service Management to Portuguese, but when you access the knowledge base to read what might be causing the issue, the results are shown in English. You can switch the language on the knowledge base to Portuguese, but this involves a journey back to the settings page in order to change it.

A user story

Seamless IT support in your preferred language across Jira and Confluence

With a little help from ScriptRunner, your service desk end-users will benefit from a smooth experience, as they will no longer have  to adjust the language settings on every application of their JIRA/Confluence profile.

ACA IT-Solutions used a HTML module of the Refined theme for injecting the flag buttons with a script.

ACA IT-Solutions used ScriptRunner to create a smooth language experience for their client Odisee - a Bruxelles University College that offers courses for over 10,000 students from 79 nationalities.

Today, a student or staff member who needs IT support can click the flag corresponding to their language of choice (Dutch or English) on the university website and instantly change the system language across both their Jira and Confluence profiles.  

ScriptRunner’s REST endpoints - the standout solution

ScriptRunner’s ‘REST endpoints’ feature was the star of ACA-IT’s solution. It supplements the REST endpoints that come as standard with Jira and Confluence, by allowing you to define your custom endpoints in ScriptRunner. With ScriptRunner’s custom REST endpoints you can:

• use the results in dashboard gadgets
• receive notifications from external systems
• plug gaps in the official REST API
• allow all your XHRs (XMLHttpRequests) to proxy through to other systems

ACA IT-Solutions adjusted the GUI by using the ‘Script Fragments’ feature of ScriptRunner to add Javascript script fragments on the Odisee portal as menu items - the English and Dutch flag buttons. Then they used the ‘REST endpoints’ feature in ScriptRunner for Confluence and ScriptRunner for Jira to create 2 REST endpoints that adjust the user language in Jira and Confluence. The GUI change was then able to call the endpoints.

So when a user switches to ‘English’ on the portal, the Jira REST endpoint switches the language to English. The script then highlights on screen the correct flag based on the active language.

The Jira REST endpoint first gets the logged-in user from the JiraAPI, then the language from the Javascript REST endpoint. The next step is to check if the locale of the logged-in is the same. If they are not, the locale is changed in Jira, and a REST call to Confluence is executed to change it there as well. The Confluence REST endpoint script works in the same way.

Unlock the full potential of Jira and Confluence with ScriptRunner

ACA IT-Solutions used ScriptRunner to successfully solve the language and translation limitations present in Jira and Confluence.

Check out the entire Odisee case study and find out all the details of ACA IT-Solutions’s work.

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