If you are like me, you love automation. But sometimes, software and automation just don't like each other.

Today, I wanted to do a really simple thing. I wanted to retrieve the release notes for an EasyMock version on Jira. Seems easy enough. Jira has a great REST API that should allow to do that in two seconds.

Wrong!

Let's say you want the release notes for version 3.2. There is no REST API for the release notes. There is one for the versions. However, to get the details of a version, you need the version id. Which isn't 3.2 but an internal id. And there is no search available on the versions.

I've decided to keep things "simple" by not using any high level language. Only bash. I'm pretty sure Gradle could have helped me but I didn't want to put my arm in there yet.

So, first step, get the id by grepping it from the list of all versions.

version=3.2
# Seems complicated but I'm just adding a backslash before the . in 3.2
escaped_version=$(echo $version | sed "s/\([0-9]*\)\.\([0-9]*\)/\1\\\.\2/")

# Retrieve all versions and the id. Hoping a bit that the fields will stay in the same order
jira_version_id=$(curl --silent "http://jira.codehaus.org/rest/api/2/project/EASYMOCK/versions" | grep -o "\"id\":\"[0-9]*\",\"description\":\"EasyMock $escaped_version\"" | cut -d'"' -f4)

Good. Now I have the version id. But sadly, the API doesn't give the release notes for this version. But the Jira GUI does. When doing it by hand, you click on the version, the on the release notes, the you select the format wanted (text or html) and finally, you reach a page with a text area showing exactly what I want.

But, of course, there's no way to get only the content of the text area. So I now need to extract it from the page

# Get the page
release_notes_page="http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?version=${jira_version_id}&styleName=Text&projectId=12103"
release_notes=$(curl --silent "$release_notes_page")

# Extract the interesting page
echo "$release_notes" | sed -n "/<textarea rows=\"40\" cols=\"120\">/,/<\/textarea>/p" | grep -v "textarea

Et voilà!

BTW, there is a Jira opened in Atlassian bug tracker asking for this exact feature. Please vote.