JIRA Studio has just implemented a lovely new administration section (https://studio.atlassian.com/secure/admin). Features to note here are, JIRA admin screens are grouped and spread across different tabs, and the correct menu section and menu item for the current page are highlighted. This makes working with JIRA administration so much easier, because you can easily keep track of where you are in JIRA's convoluted menu structure. But JIRA doesn't provide a mechanism for the administration decorator to know which menu item should be highlighted, so, the question is, how do we do it?

https://studio.atlassian.com/source/browse/JST/trunk/studio-theme/studio-theme-jira-plugin/src/main/java/com/atlassian/studio/jira/globaladmin/JiraGlobalAdminPathMapperInitialiser.java?r=31512

That's right, a hodge podge of path fragments, regular expressions, and checking request attributes that attempts (sometimes unsuccessfully) to map the current page to web items/sections.

What would be really nice is if JIRA could provide a mechanism to do this, for example, by setting a request attribute that says which web item should currently be highlighted. Obviously, the highlighting in JIRA can't be implemented at once, as third party plugins provide admin items too. But, it would mean that we could cut out so much of the crap from the above file and just leave regular expression matching to the odd case where a screen hasn't explicitly set the web item thats meant to be highlighted.