trello_py

A simple script to make my life easier...

The issue?

As a member of the CSM team, I rely on JIRA to keep track of my logged tickets, which sit with various internal teams. We have a slack channel dedicated to keeping on top of these tickets.

I use to maintain a list of my open tickets, so I could copy and paste them into the channel...this ended up fiddly and time-consuming as I had to open each ticket in a new browser tab, check it's status and then decide if it needs to be highlighted.

It was a pain! 😢

I now use Trello to manage the JIRA tickets. I use a certain naming convention.

PROJECT-TICKET_NUMBER: DESCRIPTION

I then attach a certain label to the card, so I know this is something I should bring up in our meeting. Having this process made things easier but it still became a little bit of a faff.

The fix!

I now use the Trello API and Python to make the whole process seamless. 💥

I use the API via requests call the Board endpoint which allows me to request info of a single board.

Step 1.

First, we have to modify the endpoint with our board ID turning this: url = "https://api.trello.com/1/boards/ into this url = "https://api.trello.com/1/boards/{board_id} I struggled to get the board_id but after finding a post on StackOverflow. All you have to do is put .json on the end of your board URL to get the ID in the JSON response.

https://trello.com/b/ru6s23QW/board_name.json which outputs in the browser something like this

{
  "id": "5d25d651252b4b37c8e8xxxx",
  "name": "JIRA Tickets",
  "desc": "",
  "descData": null,
  "closed": false,
  "idOrganization": null,
  "limits": {...

The queryString is simple, it's just your API_Key and API_Token which you get from here

qs = {
    'key': API_KEY,
    'token': API_TOKEN
}

Step 2.

After using requests to get a response, I extracted the main part of the JSON into another variable so I was able to manage the data easier.

# get a json response from Trello API
r = requests.get(url, params=qs)
data = r.json()

# extract the card list from data. So it's easier to manage.
cards = data.get(cards)

Step 3.

I used some simple logic to output what I need to the terminal. After looking through the card list I knew I needed to look at the name, closed which was either true or false and then dig into the labels list which had the key color.

As I used a certain label to highlight the cards I needed to bring up, I knew that I had to check to see if cards had a red label and that the status was not closed.

I broke the logic out into mini functions to clean up the code as below.

def open_tickets_func(color, status, list_ID):
    if color == 'red' and list_ID == open_ and status is False:
        name = open_tickets['name']
        ticket_num = name[0:7]
        print(f'{name} -> https://pixalate.atlassian.net/browse/{ticket_num}')

I then called the each function from for loop to clean up the loops.

for open_tickets in cards:
    try:
        if open_tickets['labels']:

            # takes label color and status and stores it as a variable
            color = open_tickets['labels'][0]['color']
            status = open_tickets['closed']

            # call the function
            open_tickets_func(color, status, list_ID)
    except:
        print('error!')

Using the if statement if color == 'red' and status is False: within the functions. I was able to check against the response for color with a value of red and closed was False. This would pull out all the cards I attached the red label too, these are the tickets I wish to bring up.

I then got the name and produced an URL from it. The ticket_num variable allowed me to append the JIRA URL with its ticket number.

I then sliced the first 6 characters from the name of the card to append to the URL using an f string. As my naming convention was PROJECT-TICKET_NUMBER: DESCRIPTION which is CS-1234: something to fix in reality. Which printed the name of the card and the tickets URL.

End results being:

Tickets:
CS-1234: some description -> https://domain.atlassian.net/browse/CS-1234

Building this allowed me to just run a simple script, instead of copying and pasting ticket URLs.

Improvements / Ideas

I would like to try and run the script and it automatically put the output into the relevant slack channel. Removing one more copy and paste.

mrpbennett / trira-py