No longer able to do IF/ELSE conditions in Jira automation rules

[Shaun McGuire]

I spent several hours of frustration today "arguing" with Rovo while trying to setup a fairly simple automation rule. I think this is likely something many many people would do. Here's the skeleton of the rule:

When a work item is transitioned

IF status = A THEN do X

IF status = B THEN do Y

IF status = C THEN do Z

in my cloud tenant, I no longer have the components available to me for nested if/else conditions. They are gone. There is no way to actually create such a rule. My only option in the end was to create three separate rules (all of which run on every transition of every work item in my project). 

Now imagine I had 50 statuses to evaluate, and I have 5000 work items open in a single project. Every transition of every work item will fire off 50 automation rules, only one of which actually means anything. 

How is this good design? Why is something like a simple IF/THEN/ELSE logic tree no longer possible? Why remove this (and apparently many, many other previously available components and actions? How is this improving anything?

Someone please tell me I've been lead astray and that I am totally wrong in this assessment. I so want to be wrong...

Also: for those who care, apparently Rovo cannot see ANYTHING in your actual tenant. So when you are asking it questions, it can't even see the rule or any of its components or settings that you are working on. It is given an empty context and a useless URL for the rule. It only knows what's in the rule if you feed it detailed descriptions or screen shots. It has ZERO knowledge of the new UI, and it has no concept of what is or isn't available for components or actions. Yet this ROVO is the greatest thing since sliced bread? 

What good is an AI agent/chatbot that doesn't know anything about your tenant? Or even the data on the screen?

[Aaron Pavez _ServiceRocket_]

Hi @Shaun McGuire 

These are the conditions under IF: Add a condition:

The IF or ELSE is there. is that the one you're missing?

Is the space software? JSM? JPD? Business? Team managed?

Regards

[Shaun McGuire]

I tried that. It worked for one "branch" or whatever after the first condition, but in my real use case, I had five statuses to evaluate and that option disappeared after I used it the one time

[Aaron Pavez _ServiceRocket_]

Is this what you want to achieve?

As mentioned by @Trudy Claspill , you can't do this under a Branch. IF/ELSE aren't supported in Branches.

Since youve already created something. its easier for us to see how far are you in creating the automation and see where you cannot use the if/else.

Regards

[Shaun McGuire]

As i said earlier, Atlassian removed the Else IF option in the newer UI. So what you've show makes sense but that is not available to me. Unless I'm missing something, I do not have a condition to add for an Else If. 

Can you show me the exact selection process for each of the steps in your rule above? I am curious to see if you see what I see in the UI

[Aaron Pavez _ServiceRocket_]

Go to Automation -> Create rule from scratch

when: field value change status

add component -> If: add condition

select IF/ELSE.

Thats it. I have the new UI and all.

Regards

[Shaun McGuire]

Thank you for your assistance. As I suspected, I was being told something totally wrong by ROVO. The support people got in touch and were able to show me EXACTLY where I was being led astray. They even have the message from ROVO that told me someone had changed something in my tenant. Bad dog, Rovo.

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Shaun McGuire 

Can you show us the rule where you are trying to add an IF/ELSE structure?

The feature is still available in my system and I have not seen any notifications that it was going away.

However, it cannot be used everywhere in a rule. For instance you cannot insert and If/Else structure within a For Each branch.

If you show us your rule perhaps and what you see when you try to add a condition at the point where you want the If/Else, then perhaps we can offer advice on the root cause of your dilemma.

[Shaun McGuire]

How would I show the rule? I laid out the logic that I'm trying to model in the rule. Nothing more complicated than that. ChatGPT, Claude, Rovo all could not figure it out. 

If you tell me what I should put here, happy to do so.

[Trudy Claspill]

To show us the rule get a screen snapshot (or multiple screen snapshots) and upload them into a response on this post. using the Insert photos option.

 

[Shaun McGuire]

Thank you to the above for your help. I appreciate the sanity check.

According to Atlassian support, ROVO lied to me and told me things that were not true. This was in the AI chat when I presented the problem and it tries to solve it before letting you open a support ticket. They had that conversation and I received a very thoughtful and polite response apologizing for the misleading statements.

They were also able to clarify what I was not understanding with how to set up the IF/ELSE blocks. Because there is nothing in the UI that explicitly looks like IF/ELSE block I needed more hand holding. Once I had the right component, then I could see the start of what to do. The missing piece is the bit where you have to click a small box to add the ELSE IF piece. That wasn't on my screen when I first tried that thing, and I was surprised to see it yesterday. But after that, I got it all to work.

Thank you again for taking time to try and help me :)

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Shaun McGuire 

As you appear to be on a Premium license level, have you tried using the new Branch with Conditions over the status values?

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Automation-articles/Introducing-Branch-with-Conditions-for-Atlassian-Automation/ba-p/3180282

To your point about using any AI-guesser-tool (including the ones provided by Atlassian), you are correct and in my opinion: they likely cannot access your products, site configuration, space configuration, workflows, views, etc.  Thus they may only provide a generic and out-of-date guess that cannot help for non-trivial rule scenarios.  One would need to provide a very complex prompt and even then I suspect the guess will not work without adjustments and extensive testing.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Shaun McGuire]

I will look into this. Thanks.