I am looking for a working smart value for an automation rule to set watcher

Rixta Padeken

Hi, 

I know it is not possible to find the @ mentioned user in general. I would like to create an automation rule, where in the comments is searched for any accountId (so far it worked) and then set these accountid as watcher. Unfortunately I am not able to find the right smart value or any working smart value except {{comment.author}}. 

My query starts with:

{{comment.body}} contains regex {{assignee.accountid}}

Now I need the "Add watcher" part.

Can anybody help we with this issue?

Petter Gonçalves

Hello @Rixta Padeken

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Per your description, I understand that you would like to automatically add a user as a watcher when he is @mentioned in a comment on the issue. Is that correct?

Indeed, the Automation for Jira does not have a simple way to configure it, but we have the following feature request open to allow @mention to be selected as a trigger in automation rules:

@mention trigger 

We suggest keeping an eye on that suggestion to receive any updates about that.

For now, the only way you can do this is to use regular expression matching. So you could set up a rule as below:

• Trigger: Issue commented

• Compare condition:

  • First value:

    {{comment.body}}

  • Matches

  • Second value:

    .*\[\~.*\].*

• Action: Manage watchers add users with this smart-value -

  {{comment.body.match(".*\[\~(.*)\].*")}}

Basically. when a comment is added and a user is mentioned, this is inserted into the comment as [~username], so the smart-value above extracts the username via a regular expression match. You can check more details about this in the documentation below:

Automation conditions 

A limitation of this approach is that it will only add one user as the watcher (if multiple users are mentioned in a comment). There's no work-around for this at the moment.

Let us know if you have any questions.