How to autopopulate a field when user submits a ticket?

[Natalie Cotela]

Hi there! We currently have a department field that we want to auto-populate when users submit a work item into Jira. Do you know how I can set this up in Jira Cloud? Thanks!

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Natalie Cotela 

In what type of Space is the work item being submitted?

How do you decide what the value of the department field should be? Is it the same for all work items, or is it based on something in the work item?

What type of field is this department field?

There are a few ways this might be accomplished:

1. Set a default value for the custom field in the field context

2. Use an Automation rule triggered by creation of the issue and with an Edit Work Item action to set the field. Are you familiar with Automation Rules?

[Karan Sachdev]

If the value is fixed for a given work type, we can also use workflow post functions to update custom field value when the transition is executed. This would optimise the automation rule usage.

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Natalie Cotela 

You said:

Hey all! We will submit work items to any workspace and need the Department Field to be auto-populated with what the reporter's department is after the work item is created.

We need to know specifically what type of Spaces this includes. Are they Company-managed or Team-managed? Are they Business, Software, or Service? You can get that information from the Type column when you view the Space list from Spaces > More Spaces > View All Spaces.

Are you subscribed to only the Jira product or are you also subscribed to the Jira Service Management product?

The answers to the above two questions will impact the options available to you for a solution.

You could create a User Group for each department and ensure that the user is added to the appropriate group for their department. Your tags indicate you are on an Enterprise subscription, so if you are using an external IdP for user and group provisioning you might set that up in your IdP. With User Groups you could create an Automation rule that uses an IF/ELSE structure to check the group to which the user belongs and set the Department field accordingly. Here's an example:

If you are a subscriber of the JSM product then another solution may be to keep track of your users and their associated department via Assets. Then in your automation rule instead of using an IF/ELSE block you would look up the user in the Assets schema and extract their Department from that for adding to the issue.

[Natalie Cotela]

Hi there!

They are company managed spaces. 

We only have Jira Cloud and not Jira Service Management.

[Trudy Claspill]

Thank you for the additional information @Natalie Cotela 

I would advise you to go with the suggestion I provided about using User Groups and an Automation Rule, then.

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Natalie Cotela 

Did the advice I provided enable you to address your requirement?

If not, please let us know what additional questions you have.

If the advice did help, please consider clicking on the Accept Answer button above my responses. That will mark your Question as Solved. This will help others searching the community for answers find this validated solution.

[Natalie Cotela]

I don't think that is very clean to make a user group for every single department as that would make permissions quite a mess, would it not?

If I am understanding correctly, would need all users added to X department user group in addition to the already existing user groups that currently provide access to spaces then would need to apply the department user groups to the permissions schemes? That would be over 50 user groups which I could see being problematic. 

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello Natalie,

If you have a set of groups that you use already for permissions you would not have to change that. These additional Department groups would not need to be added to permissions to be usable in the Automation Rule I outlined.

Given that your post tags say that you are on an Enterprise plan I am guessing that your environment is integrated with an IDP and you are provisioning users into Atlassian Cloud. You could explore alternatives where you include a person's Department in the information that you send with user provisioning, and look at the options to try to get that information from within Jira. That is not something I have worked on so I don't have any details about it.

There is a KB here on User Properties that might be helpful:

https://support.atlassian.com/jira/kb/display-additional-information-with-user-property-custom-field-in-jira-cloud/

And there may be third party apps in the Altassian Marketplace that would be helpful.

Another alternative is to subscribe to the Jira Service Management app to gain access to the Assets feature. With that you can create records within Assets for each user with those records including the user's Department. Then within Jira you can access the user's Assets record to get their Department information and add it to the work item.

[Natalie Cotela]

Hey all! We will submit work items to any workspace and need the Department Field to be auto-populated with what the reporter's department is after the work item is created.

We want this so we can track what teams are requesting work and to ease reporting. 

So is there a way to link an org chart in Jira and build the automation off of that?

Some examples are below. 

Reporter 1 - Department = Order to Cash

Reporter 2 - Department = Procurement

Reporter 3 - Department = Revenue Operations

Reporter 4 - Department = Customer Care

Reporter 5 - Department = Customer Success

[Rohit Utukuri]

Hi @Natalie Cotela ,

An automation with "Work item created" trigger, should be able add users once a work item is submitted in Jira.