Allow access to private filters for everybody

Situation
Imagine you are a normal Jira user, without special permissions (i.e. "JIRA Administrators" or "Create shared filter"). You have created a wonderful filter with exactly the right columns in the perfect order - and now you want to share it with some of your colleges.

But it is impossible

If you send them a link to your filter, they will get this message:
"You do not have the permission to view the selected private filter"

And if you give them a Permlink to your filter, they won't see what you see.

It is even worse, if you have used your private filter to create a report - there is no way you can share this report with others.

"Semi-workarounds"
You could send a perm-link to the filter

• But it is an extra step
• And more importantly - you will lose you column layout

Or you could ask your filter-administrator to create a shared filter

• But you have to involve others and it is extra work
• And you may not have a suitable JIRA-group in your setup, to share the filter to
  (Unless it is a truly brilliant filter, which your administrator will share globally)

Solution

• This way it would be easy to share filters and reports with simple links.

This would also reduce some of the other problems with filters:

• You don't need to create extra groups, just for sharing a filter
  (in our organisation we use project-roles in stead of JIRA-groups)
• You are no longer limited to share filters to ONE group of users (JRA-4139)
• It would reduce the need for shared filters - which again would ease the administration of filters

Possible problems
I can't see any. No matter how the filtering is done (filter or Permlink), the user will only see the issues he is allowed to see.

Of course the link would stop working, if the private filter is deleted - but that is the way of links (and also true for shared filters).

If the filter is changed after the link has been sent, it may confuse the user of the link (again, that is also true for shared filters). It is probably a bigger problem with private filters, so perhaps there should be a note in the filter-information box, that the current filter is private.

If it turns out, that there is a problem with allowing everyone to see all private filters, you could add a new option to "Global permissions":
"Allow use of all private filters for group(s): <Jira-group>"

Example
Here is a great filter I have created:
http://jira.atlassian.com/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?requestId=15160&mode=hide

And here is the Permlink - but without my column layout:
http://jira.atlassian.com/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&&query=enterprise&summary=true&description=true&environment=true&type=4&type=2&pid=10240&resolution=-1&sorter/field=priority&sorter/order=DESC&sorter/field=updated&sorter/order=DESC

And if you want to see my report - you have to do the following:

1. save the Permlink as your own filter
2. go to any project and chose "Single level group by report"
3. use your new filter
4. and group by component

...or you could look at the attached screen dump.

It would be so much easier, if you could just use this link:
http://jira.atlassian.com/secure/ConfigureReport.jspa?filterid=15160&mapper=components&selectedProjectId=10240&reportKey=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.reports%3Asinglelevelgroupby&Next=Next