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What is Projectrak?

(supported since Better PDF Exporter 7.3.0)

Projectrak is the project administration app for Jira that enables adding custom fields to projects, such as due dates, budgets and supervisors.

Projectrak integration features

  • You can export the Projectrak-managed issue custom field types to which the Projectrak-managed project custom fields are mapped. The supported project custom field types include Date, Duration, Group, List, Number, Priority, Project, Status, Text and User. (Cumulative and Script are not supported, as those cannot be mapped to issue custom fields.)

(Need more features? Tell us in a support ticket!)

Projectrak integration vs. the Projectrak built-in PDF exports

You may want to ask: if Projectrak has a built-in PDF export feature, why would you use another app for the same?

While the Projectrak built-in PDF exports may be sufficient for basic use cases, the Better PDF Exporter integration is more powerful in, at least, these:

If at least one of these is important for you, give the app a try.

Tutorial video

After mapping the project custom fields to issue custom fields (using the standard Projectrak feature), the Better PDF Exporter app transparently exports those to PDF:

Projectrak PDF export samples

Jira issue with Projectrak custom fields

This sample is a single Jira issue exported to PDF, transparently merging issue-specific fields (like Status) with project-specific fields managed by Projectrak (like Project customer). Better PDF Exporter can export Projectrak data, mapped project custom fields to issue custom fields, without any configuration.

jira-projectrak-export.pdf

Jira issue list with Projectrak custom fields

This PDF document contains issues from multiple projects. Note that each row contains Projectrak-managed data obtained from the issue's encompassing project, in the columns from "Project" to "Final project deadline".

jira-projectrak-issue-navigator.pdf

Jira project list with Projectrak custom fields

Not only issues, but also projects can be exported to PDF (using this technique). If you have a large number of Jira projects, it offers an easy way to search, share project information between stakeholders and executives.

jira-projectrak-project-export.pdf

Configuration

Configuring the Projectrak custom fields for issues

Please note that the Projectrak-managed custom fields are primarily attached to projects (not to issues). To make them available also for issues, map the project fields to Jira issue custom fields by using the Map into a Jira issue custom field option (in the Special options dropdown at Projectrak field settings).

After this, Better PDF Exporter will automatically recognize the issue custom fields to which the project custom fields are mapped to, and export them accordingly.

Configuring the Projectrak custom fields for projects

In another Projectrak-related use case, you want to export the projects (not issues) and their custom fields to PDF. Although the default export types offered by Better PDF Exporter primarily focus on issues, exporting project is also possible with an easy workaround.

Steps:

  1. Open Issue Navigator.
  2. Select exactly one issue from each project you want to export. (See the next section for techniques.)
  3. Show the Project column.
  4. Show the columns with those Projectrak-managed fields that you want to export.
  5. Hide all issue-specific columns (like Summary and such).
  6. At this point, there is one project in each line and there are only project-dependent columns shown. Export using the "Issue List (PDF)" option in the Export drop-down menu.
  7. Voila, you have just exported your projects to PDF!

All right, but how to select the issues as in step 2 above?

  1. If you want to export only a couple of projects, you can write a JQL by enumerating the first issue keys in those:
    key IN (FOO-1, BAR-1, BAZ-1) ORDER BY project
    This is simple, but it is painful for a larger number of projects.
  2. If you want to make it more automatic, introduce a new issue type that represents projects, and give it some intuitive name, e.g. "Project Object". Then, create exactly one instance of this issue type in each project. Having that, a JQL query like this will return that single issue from each project:
    type = "Project Object" ORDER BY project
    Note that it will work for any number of projects until there is one "Project Object" type issue created in those.
  3. If you need more flexibility, write a short Groovy script that receives the issue collection as input, iterates over it, only leaves one issue per project and removes the rest, and returns the resulted collection to the template.

Learn more about Projectrak