I see this issue has history, for example JRA-861, JRA-33 and several other items.

I can now define a regex for project keys in jira-application.properties.

I would like to use a pattern like this:

jira.projectkey.pattern = ([a-z][0-9a-z]{1,6}\.[A-Za-z][0-9A-Za-z]{1,4})

• We need to support multiple customers each with multiple projects in a number of JIRA installations.
• We need to be able to migrate JIRA projects between JIRA instances.

We need a namespace where the project keys of different customers won't collide regardless of whether they are using the same or different installations of JIRA.

The easiest way for us to do this would be to prefix our customer account name (from 2 to 7 lower case letters) to the Project Key, separated by a dot. Hence the above pattern.

JIRA accepts the pattern, but the JIRA user interface automatically converts project keys to uppercase. So, it's useless to specify any other pattern, because it won't work with the JIRA user interface anyway.

You need to fix this by doing one of the following:

• Allow lower case letters in Project Keys and also have the User Interface support this. The UI needs to check the project key against what is configured in jira.projectkey.pattern. Now your UI uses some local logic, which is a bug. Of course it should be compatible with what the user has configured.

• If you don't want to support lower case letters, then document that in jira-application.properties.