Can I create widgets for the issue tracker?

I’m currently developing a GitLab-enabled application that interacts with its users through GitLab issues.

I intend to add a number of specialized features to the issue tracker, ranging from finding related issues (based on project-specific definitions of “related”) to statistics about issues, buttons to take project-specific actions about these issues, etc.

Now, creating and updating an issue is fairly easy. My problem is that some of the data displayed on issue (e.g. related issues and statistics) changes with time. I could have my application modify all issues whenever we update statistics, for instance, but this seems highly suboptimal. I’d rather display some kind of widget within the issue tracker and/or within the issue itself to fetch the data and show it when it’s needed.

Is there any kind of support for this kind of feature? I’ve tried to insert an <iframe> within the markdown of the issue, but it is unsurprisingly sanitized away. What else could I try?

We do provide something similar that you can consider building after: Badges | GitLab

The endpoints serving the linked image for a badge will render an SVG on the fly with the latest information.

Yeah, I was exploring the idea of injecting an ![](http://myserver/issue/${issueid}/status.svg) image with all the data. As far as I can tell, that’s the only thing that can be updated dynamically.