Is there a way to extract a Confluence link out of a description and link it properly?

Question

Hi,

My teams seem to be unable to remember to use an "official" Confluence link type when linking pages to issues and, instead, paste links into the descriptions.  I was trying to build an automation rule that can scan the description for a Confluence link and properly replace it but I didn't see anything other than an issue link action.

Is this even possible?

Thanks,

Cory

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Thanks for clarifying, @Cory Tsang

I have not tried this, but it appears those links are "remote issue links", and there is a REST API to manage them: https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/jira/platform/rest/v3/api-group-issue-remote-links/#api-group-issue-remote-links

Perhaps you could extract the URL from the description and then call the REST API with a web request to do this.  To learn about calling the REST API from a rule, please take a look at this article: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-articles/Automation-for-Jira-Send-web-request-using-Jira-REST-API/ba-p/1443828

Cory Tsang · Answer

Rather than using the "Link Confluence Page" menu action on an issue, they are just copying and pasting the url to the Confluence page into the description.  Ideally, the description field might detect the URL comes from the same site and auto-converts it to a linked Confluence page.

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Cory Tsang

Would you please clarify a bit what is happening and what you mean by "official Confluence link"?  For example, what are team members pasting into the issue description and what happens when they do so?

Kind regards,
Bill