In Jira Automation how can I set assignee to a "Firstname Lastname" value I get from another field?

[Kyle]

I am using OpsGenie Cloud with Jira Cloud and have configured the OpsGenie integration to add a comment to the Jira issue when an OpsGenie user acts on an alert. The comment that is added to the Jira issue looks like:

[Opsgenie]: Firstname Lastname acknowledged alert: "Alert Title"

I would like to assign the Jira issue to the "Firstname Lastname" user who is mentioned in the comment. All of my OpsGenie users are valid Jira users.

I am able to use the smart field {{comment.body.match(": (\w+ \w+) ")}} to pull out the "Firstname Lastname" string from the comment. I tried using that smartvalue to set Assignee but it fails. It seems that I need an accountID to set Assignee. How can I look up the accountID for that "Firstname Lastname" string?

Thanks for any advice.

[Bill Sheboy · Accepted solution]

Hi @Kyle 

There is an open suggestion to find users by name from within an automation rule: https://codebarrel.atlassian.net/browse/AUT-725

As a work-around (albeit a slower one) you could use a webrequest to call the REST API with a user search to get the account ID, and use that for assignment.  Here are some references if you want to try that approach:

• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-articles/Automation-for-Jira-Send-web-request-using-Jira-REST-API/ba-p/1443828
• https://docs.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/api/REST/1000.824.0/#api/2/user-findUsers

Best regards,
Bill

[Kyle]

Thanks for the pointers to those articles Bill. I'll try the REST API way.

[Kyle]

@Bill Sheboy with some experimentation I totally got it working. I like it. Thanks again for the pointers to a solution.

For future reference here are the automation steps that I used:

1. a "Send web request" step configured as follows

- Webhook URL: https://<put-your-sitename-here>.atlassian.net/rest/api/3/user/search?query={{comment.body.match("\[Opsgenie\]:\s(\w+\s\w+)\s").urlEncode}}

that smart field match gets the "firstname lastname" from the comment and urlEncodes it to be part of the REST API query parameter, use your own regex in this place

- Headers: Authorization = Basic <my-API-key-encoded-per-that-other-article>

- HTTP method: GET

- Webhook body: Empty

- check Delay execution of subsequent rule actions to that the next step can use the returned value

2. an "Edit issue fields" step which sets Assignee to

{{webhookResponses.first.body.accountId}}

[Adrian Danemayer]

@Kyle Thanks for the detailed solution, this solved a very troublesome task I had been stumped on for some time. For anyone who is in a similar situation, I was unable to execute the user lookup by email address from a python script remotely due to GDPR restrictions, but this webhook executed in the Automation panel apparently circumvents that block.