Automation action triggered by start date instead of due date

[Julia Brown]

I have an automation rule that runs once a day to find all issues in my project "due <= 30d" and send me an email about the upcoming deadline. However, the rule will not work if an issue does not include a start date as well. I have been adding start dates as the same day as the due dates to get around this, but I would like to fix the root issue.

[Jack Brickey]

Hi @Julia Brown , welcome to the Community.

Can you please share your rule so I can better understand possible cause. My first Siri would be that your rule somehow includes the start date. I can't think of any other reason why it would be interfering with comparing to the due date.

[Julia Brown]

There's really not much to it

[Jack Brickey]

Thanks. Indeed pretty straightforward. One thing I would suggest is to add an 'and not done' component to your JQL as I assume you do not want to see issues that are complete. Typically the JQL would be "AND resolution is EMPTY" but this assumes that you are indeed, setting the resolution when issues are resolved.

now, with that said, let's get back to your primary issue. Can you provide some evidence of where the start date is required for this rule to succeed? How did you conclude that the start date was required? 

[Julia Brown]

Good idea, I set Status = TO-DO.

I attempted to replicate the problem with test issues with screenshots...and of course it worked just fine. So I'm looking back at the issues that I was supposed to get alerts for back in January to see what the differences might be.  

• I'm both the assignee and reporter for my test issues, but only reporter for the issue I had a problem with. This shouldn't matter as the rule says it will email assignee and reporter.
• Both are indeed in project EQU
• The issues from January that didn't work are under a workstream. This workstream doesn't have a due date. My test issues are not under a work stream at all. Could this somehow impact things?

I'm positive I never got an email for the issues in January. I went back to add a start date in for everything, executed the rule, then began getting emails for everything I edited. Perhaps it was the editing that triggered them to be noticed by the automation again, but still doesn't explain why I didn't get one in the first place. I'm going to check the audit log for the automation rule tomorrow to see what else I can find. I'm still stumped

[Jack Brickey]

I'm not sure what you mean by workstream. However, if any issue do not have a due date, it would not show up in your query. So it would not be in your email either. Your rule is triggered on a schedule so editing the issues will have no impact other than if you add in a due date to any issues that did not have a due date then on the next day, when the rule runs, they would be picked up. In the future, one way to assess this is to simply use the JQL query from your rule and execute that in the advanced issue search. Then you can look at what the query returns. It should be exactly what you see in the email.

Finally, one more word of caution, you indicated that you added "to do" in your query. Is this really what you want? This means that all other statuses, such as in progress, would be excluded from the email. It seems to me that what you would want out of this email would be a list of all issues that are due within the next 30 days that have not yet been completed. However, I don't know exactly what you use cases so there is that.