How do you automate a filter result to email automatically someone outside your organization?

[Brian Noble]

Goal is automate a weekly report to show all the tickets that have been created in the past week. 

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Brian Noble -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

To help focus suggestions, what problem are you trying to solve by doing this?  That is, "why do this"?  Knowing this may help the community to offer better suggestions.  And it may help to discuss this with your Jira Site Admin to learn what they suggest.

Until we learn that...

Possible solutions may depend upon:

• what you mean by "report",
• how many issues you expect per week,
• and what you mean by "outside of your organization".

Let's start simple with a filter subscription: if you mean a list of Jira issues, with 200 issues or less, sent to someone in your company who does not have Jira access, you could create a saved filter, subscribe to it, and use your internal email system to automatically forward it to the person.

If you do not want to be the middle-person in this exchange, and there are 100 issues or less, you could instead use an automation for Jira rule.  The challenge here is what do you mean by "all the tickets that have been created in the last week."  If you mean for one project, create the rule in one project.  If you mean in your entire Jira instance, the rule will need to be global.

What if you need a more complex report?  You may want to investigate either the Atlassian Marketplace for custom reporting to do what you need, or pull the issues into an external reporting tool using the REST API, or build something to do so.  These options will help if there are more than the noted 100 or 200 issue limits, as paging through issues is possible.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Brian Noble]

Hi Bill, 

I am new to Jira. I was pretty much an expert with a different tool used for ticketing. 

Report isn't probably the right term here, I would say you call it a filter. 

I created a filter to show all the tickets that have been created either by alerts, email, call in, etc.  I would like Jira to email this "filter" to my client. I can subscribe to the filter and it worked great.  However, you cannot add anyone to it.  You can select groups, but you can't input anything. 

On average, I would estimate my client has about 140 tickets per month. 

Outside of our organization, meaning the people that I need to send this report to that is not part of the prepopulated groups you can add when you hit the subscribe. 

The purpose of wanting to automate the report is to remove me having to manually do a task that could be automated. I will review the automation link you put above.  

Thank you, 

Brian

[Brian Noble]

I went through a tutorial and was able to schedule an automated job.  However, I noticed in the instructions and "more options" that isn't available to me for some reason.  This more options allows you to "bulk" tickets together as opposed to sending 1 email per incident.  

The instructions I am following are listed here: 

https://confluence.atlassian.com/automation/bulk-handling-of-issues-993924653.html#Runaruleagainstissuesinbulk-example

[Bill Sheboy]

That link is to the instructions for Jira Server / Data Center version.  For Jira Cloud, you have a better action of using Lookup Issues.

For that, your scheduled trigger has no JQL.  Instead use the JQL with the Lookup Issues action: https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-automation-actions/#Lookup-issues

[Brian Noble]

Update. 

- Scheduled, and just set your schedule when you want the report to be delivered. 

- Then - Look up issues and input the JQL

- Validate

It should return the results

Here is the tricky part. 

- Send email

In the send email, you have to use HTML to render the results correctly in the email.  This isn't too bad, but you do have to know or learn HTML. 

I can get it to pull almost every field I am looking for, but it will not pull component and I don't know how to pull the ULR that the client can access.  There is a different URL for client access and I can't seem to find that. 

I also cannot seem to get the html right to use a table instead of a list.  

Here is the HTML I used for the list: 

{{#lookupIssues}}
<LI>

Ticket Number: {{key}}
Summary: {{summary}}
Status: {{Status.name}}
URL: {{URL}} - Only gives URL for internal portal access, not the client access portal
Created: {{Created}}
Component: {{Component.name}} - Returns no values

{{/}}

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Brian Noble 

The components smart value is a list as it can have zero-to-many values, and the smart value is:

{{issue.components}}

https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-smart-values-issues/#--issue.components--

And, I believe if you search in the community you will find examples of creating HTML table syntax to create emails in rules.  Remember to build your header outside of the loop iteration to add the rows, and then close the table outside the loop's ending {{/}}

[Brian Noble]

Not all hero's wear capes.  Thanks for the help. 

I have tried both {{issue.components.name}} and {{issue.components}} and it isn't working.  I will keep digging.  

[Bill Sheboy]

Oops, my bad: you are inside the iterator at that point for the lookup.

Please us this to produce the list of comma-separated values inside of the {{#lookupIssues}} ... {{/}} structure.

{{components.name}} 

[Brian Noble]

I have tried that too in our test project.  Now that I have a good understanding, I am going to try on a live project. 

You wouldn't know where to grab the URL for the client portal as opposed to internal access? When you add URL, it only adds the internal access.  If a client would try to click on the link to access the ticket, they wouldn't have access.  I can't seem to find where that is at.  

Thanks for the help Bill

[Bill Sheboy]

The URL provided by an issue only works for people who have Jira access for your site.  Are you trying to provide this information to those without access?