notification scripting

the notification scheme stuff is very cool, but could be better.

on several occasions now, I've wanted something where a notification would be sent in certain situations, but I'm unable to express the situations using a scheme. in particular, although I can trigger a notification on issue create, I can't say "trigger on issue create, if the issue is in component X, and was not created by user Y".

it's hard to see a simple way of enabling this from the GUI.

here's one possibility. allow the list of notification triggers to be edited. instead of having a single "issue created" trigger, with some number of notifications attached to it, allow any number of "issue created" triggers. each trigger could have an optional attribute, which is a boolean valued expression in some simple language. the notifications for the trigger would fire if the expression evaluated to true in the context of the issue in question.

so, for example, you could have some number of primitive operators:

component C <-- true if the current issue is in component C
reporter R <-- etc.
beforetime T <-- true if the issue was created before time T

and some boolean connectives, and you're done. when an issue is created, JIRA looks for all "issue created" triggers, executes their condition expressions in the context of the current issue, and fires the notifications if the condition is true. or better, the "issue created" trigger type could just be incorportated into the expression.

there are probably other places in JIRA that could use this sort of thing. listeners, for example, could be configured to fire only for a certain project.