Insight Automation Email Notification: Recipient By Attribute

[PD Sheehan]

I was reviewing https://documentation.mindville.com/insight/latest/insight-automation-33467001.html#InsightAutomation-Emailnotification

And I'm finding that there is no explanation whatsoever of how to use the "Recipients By Attribute" field.

That field seems to imply we can get a recipient from an object attribute, but that seems to go directly against the note "At least one of the two email related fields (Jira Recipients, External Recipients) must contain valid values".

My particular use case is that I have an Owner attribute on the object that I want to trigger an email from. This attribute is an object reference to a User object type. The user object type has both Email and Jira Account attributes.

Can I, somehow, with this configuration, send an email to the owner of my object when my IQL rule is true?

What would be nice is if I could select the recipient with Owner.Email

[Björn Gullander · Accepted solution]

In an automation rule, you will only be able to use attributes from the object that triggered the automation. As the Email attribute you want to use belongs to another object type, it is not possible to do the way you want. (would be really good if it was possible though...)

A workaround would be to make sure that the automation rule is triggered by the User object instead. Unfortunately you will not be able to send any information about the connected object in the email - only attributes from the User will be available in that case. 

For example, if your object type is called Service, you could trigger a rule every hour on Users connected to a Service object with certain conditions. Set up a scheduled event with an IQL like this objecttype=User AND object HAVING inboundReferences(objectType = Service AND Status="Take action") 

[PD Sheehan]

Thanks @Björn Gullander 

I already make extensive use of groovy automation.
I think that would be a cleaner implementation for me.

I mostly wanted to understand that built-in feature and its limitations.