Where are the smart button templates picked from?

[David Corlette]

I'm trying to set up a custom automation in Confluence, triggered by a button on the page. I've created the automation rule, and it shows up in the list of rules - scope is the space, accessible to all admins.

When I create a Smart Button on a page in that space, I'm offered a list of templates that does not seem to have any relationship with other templates under Automation and, specifically, does not list my custom automation rule.

How do I create a custom automation rule and attach it to the button?

[Barbara Szczesniak · Accepted solution]

@David Corlette Since I'm on Standard, I haven't really used Automation yet, but there is this article from July 2024 when they added Smart Buttons: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-articles/End-Users-Can-Now-Easily-Leverage-Automation-for-Confluence-with/ba-p/2747531 

Then there was this article on December 23 where there is something about Smart Buttons toward the bottom: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-articles/Changes-to-the-location-of-Confluence-Automations-Manual-Trigger/ba-p/2901777 

We can also try tagging @Avinoam here, and maybe he can offer assistance.

[David Corlette]

@Avinoam Barbara was helpful in pointing to these articles, but from what I'm reading in the comments in those posts, it's still not possible to attach ANY manual custom automation to a Smart Button, we can only use this weirdly restricted set that y'all have provided - correct?

[Avinoam]

@David Corlette that's correct. We're in the process of building out a contextual builder to allow you to create your own custom rules from smart buttons.

[David Corlette]

@Avinoam here's my use case in case it's helpful:

- We have a business process for product launches that involves creating a project proposal in Confluence with lots of description and whatnot, having stakeholders review it and approve, and then the project starts

- The project proposal includes a Confluence Marketing Plan which describes the collateral, tasks, etc that will be completed as part of the project

- Marketing has a Jira business project that implements parent Campaign issues, with child Asset Request issues and Stories and so forth

- What I'd like to be able to do, once the Marketing Plan is documented and approved, is to click on a button to "push" all the documented work into Jira tickets. 

Some notes:

1. Since the Campaign-level issue key will be documented as a page property, it would be nice if the automation rules could reference page properties so that e.g. we can set the 'Parent' field on the generated Jira issue. Otherwise I'll have to do some complex page content extraction, which will be error-prone. https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-78944. Or set the Parent field manually - even worse.
2. Since I will be generating 1 or more Jira tickets based off of lists on the Confluence page (say, a list of datasheets we need for the campaign), it would be convenient to be able to pass that list to the Automation and have the rule iterate through it. One way to do this would be to have the Smart Button have some embedded content (the way an Info panel does, for example), and to pass that content as a variable to the Automation rule. Then within the rule, have some way to split() that content (CSV or pipe-separated, say) and run an action chain on each element. I imagine this would be something like an IF - an EACH, if you will. Otherwise I have to do complicated content parsing of the page, plus a ton of IF clauses or something to make this work.

HTH

[David Corlette]

@Avinoam Oh, sorry, one other thing: I've also submitted feedback (through the product) to support Smart Values in Confluence templates, s.t. the Jira Automation 'Create page in Confluence' Action could easily generate a Confluence page and inject a bunch of issue data into it.

I'm currently using Web Requests with a bunch of manual template extraction and JSON manipulation, which is not fun... well I guess it was fun to figure out, but it's likely very fragile.

[Bartosz Dec]

I'm trying to do the same thing. The trigger: "Manual trigger from page. Rule is run when manually triggered by the user from a page" suggests that the new rule should be available to use from a Smart Button on a page. But when I add a new one, I can only see the list of "Available Templates" showing the automation list already set up by default.

In this case, I don't see any way of running a rule using this trigger.

To me it seems to be a bug. 

[B Kulmar]

I agree, you should be able to see the rule via the Smart Button.

You can still trigger the rule by clicking the three dots on a page via the left sidebar and selecting Automation but it's not as intuitive.