JIRA Automation: publish a new page in Confluence fails on lookupIssues smart values

[Ryan Saul]

I am attempting to use this new Publish a new page in Confluence automation. I have the connection setup and I have confirmed that I can create simple pages if the smart values are simple, like a webhook value.

But I have a list of issues that I would like to publish with and that seems to be tripping up this automation rule.

We use the "Lookup work items" automation to get a list of relevant items for later automation steps. Importantly, we have other actions that work successfully using #lookupIssues and smart values.

I have tried several approaches to this and all are encountering the following error:

Could not parse page content. If you are using the {{agentResponse}} smart value, try changing the agents prompt.

Approach 1 - this is what we can use in our Teams messages currently:

{{#lookupIssues}}{{#if(equals(issueType.name, "Story"))}}
📗 [{{key}}]({{url}}) *{{Release Notes}}*

{{/}}{{/}}

Approach 2:

{{#lookupIssues}}

{{key}} - ({{url}})

{{/}}

Approach 3 - this uses code snippets as mentioned in the documentation:

```

{{#lookupIssues}}

{{key}} - ({{url}})

```

Approach 4 - this is taken directly from the example given on the documentation:

```

{{#lookupIssues}}

<a href="{{url}}">{{key}} - {{summary}}</a>

```

All of these approaches have the above error in the audit log.

Please help, it was already very difficult to get the original approach to work with Teams, but I can't figure out how to get this working on this new automation at all.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Ryan Saul -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

For a question like this, context is important for the community to help.  Please post the following:

• an image of your complete automation rule in a single image for continuity
• images of any relevant actions / conditions / branches
• an image of the audit log details showing the rule execution

Until we see those...

Have you checked if any of the fields included in the content for the page contain characters which cannot be used in that action to create a page?  For example, special characters in the Summary or Release Notes fields you note.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Ryan Saul]

Hi Bill, I won’t be able to get those screens until tomorrow unfortunately. I believe Approach 3 rules out the special character issue no? 

I was hoping someone with experience with this new automation could provide an example that works for them on the lookupIssues API. I’m able to get a simple smart value to work, but lookupIssues throws this error consistently.

[Bill Sheboy]

Seeing your actual rule will help to fault-isolate for any other possible causes.  For example, even that simple case based on the help / documentation could fail when the lookup results are empty.

And, to read what others have encountered with that new rule action, please see the article which first announced it:

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Automation-articles/We-ve-enabled-rich-text-editing-in-the-Publish-new-page-in/ba-p/3041023

[Ryan Saul]

I'm having issues posting examples on my replies for some reason, but I was able to resolve this.

The trick was that I need to enclose the logic in the triple-backtick blocks now and in my example above I wasn't closing out the lookupIssues block with a slash.

I was doing this because the documentation pop-out for rich text smart values was cut-off:

I would post some more image examples of this, but the uploader is having a lot of trouble with it unfortunately and the community forums keep flagging my responses as having HTML elements.

But in the above image you can see the fix which was to enclose both the lookupIssues and if statements in end slashes.

[Bill Sheboy]

Thanks for confirming the cause was from the documentation display being hidden / truncated.

When using smart value expressions with the pound # sign, there is always a closing syntax added.  This includes the long-format of list iteration, conditional expressions, and single-field handling for special formatting (e.g., with dates).  To learn more, please look here:

https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/formatting-smart-values-in-jira-automation/#Using---for-sections-and-lists

[Malene Vikkelsø]

Hi @Ryan Saul 

Your screenshot helped me out as well, with the missing {{/}}

In your screenshots, you are using {{url}}. Have you managed to get that part working and getting an actual hyperlink inserted, and not just the link in plain text?

Automation rule "Edit page"-action format

Result in Confluence

When using the format below, I am getting the URL in text, not the hyperlink part. It seems like <a href> is ignored.

 <a href={{url}}>{{url}}</a>  

Have you managed to solve this?

Cheers,

Malene

[Samuel Bass]

This looks related to a confirmed Atlassian bug rather than a syntax issue: CONFCLOUD-83228 / AUTO-2118 (https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AUTO-2118). The "Could not parse page content" error fires when a smart value resolves to an empty value inside a table cell in the "Publish new page in Confluence" action

The official ticket says there's no known workaround other than avoiding empty values in table cells, but I found one that works:

Instead of trying to control what shows up in the cell (I tried a direct smart value, an {{#if}}/{{else}} conditional, and pre-resolving into a variable and all still hit the same error when the underlying field/list was empty), make sure the value is never empty by the time the page gets built:

1. Branch: IF the field (or lookupIssues result) is empty
2. THEN: Edit issue → set a placeholder value, or in the lookupIssues case, skip/guard the table block entirely for that run
3. Add "Re-fetch issue data" right after any edit, before the Confluence action
4. Continue to Publish page as normal

For a single field this is straightforward. For lookupIssues returning an empty list specifically, you may need an {{#if}} around the whole table (not just a cell) checking if the lookup result is non-empty, and rendering an alternate "no items found" block instead of the table when it is.

Worth a comment/vote on the bug ticket too if this is still affecting people — it's currently sitting as unresolved with no workaround documented.