How can I avoid using accountid literals in automation rules?

[Nathan Rogowski]

I have two use cases where I am inserting accountid literals in jira automation rules:

1. The process being automated requires a particular person to be pinged or assigned to a work item (independent of any context available to that specific work item).
2. Error-handling branches add a comment @ the initiator with me CC'd as a followup mention so they know what step they missed and who to contact if they're unable to resolve the problem themselves.

In both of these cases, rules will need updating if the person filling the role changes. Case 1 is more general, whereas case 2 could be solvable if there's a smart value for referencing the rule owner user.

I have had a similar problem in the past when creating JQL filters, and I solved it by having separate filters where the literal accountids would go, and using these as filter=###### in other filters.

Is there a similar trick I can use for automation, to only have literal values defined in one place for better maintainability? I'm hoping for something like space-global smartvalues, or a way to include a set of predefined smartvalues into my rules' scopes.

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Nathan Rogowski 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

I think this would be a good use case for creating a Lookup Table in your rule.

https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-automation-actions/#Create-lookup-table

You define a table of key/value pairs. Use the key to identify the user role, with the value set to the account id for the relevant user.

Wherever you need to use the account id you use the smart value that uses the key to pull it from the table.

[Nathan Rogowski]

Thanks Trudy! I did some searching based on your suggestion and I found this question about sharing lookup tables between rules.

@Bill Sheboy posted some helpful info there, including a link to where @fdehne provides a workaround two weeks ago, so I think that's probably my best option right now for avoiding the need to update every rule if an accountid needs updating across all of them.