Help with Automations

Question

Hello,

I am new to Jira and am looking for some insight.

I am looking to use automations to help with rescheduling issue dependencies.

My ideal workflow I am trying to achieve is as follows:

- Due date for task A is moved 5 days out

- Start date and due date for linked task B is moved out by 5 days

Ideally I want task B to move by how ever many days I moved task A by. So far I have only been able to move the due date by a standard timeframe (ie {{issue.startDate.plusDays(7)}}). The automation for the start date removes the start date all together. I am not sure what I have done wrong. I have attached a screen shot of how my rule is currently set up.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Bridget Martin

First let's confirm what I provided and you are using is working.  So try writing that smart value directly to the audit log, perhaps with some text:

Days difference: {{changelog.duedate.from.diff(changelog.duedate.to).days}}

Next, I see a couple of things in your rule:

a) At this time, created variables cannot be used as parameters to functions.  The possible work-arounds are to use the value directly in the function call, or to set it to an entity property and then use it.  Please try the first work-around...first...such as:

{{issue.duedate.plusDays(changelog.duedate.from.diff(changelog.duedate.to).days)}}

b) More importantly, you wanted to iterate over the linked/blocked tasks to update them, but that is not what your branch does.  Please try using a branch with JQL instead to find the issues with those links and types.  For example:

issue in linkedIssues( {{triggerIssue.key}} , "blocks" )

Please test this JQL stand-alone first with some example to see that it produces what you expect.

Bridget Martin_7wbo68 · Answer

Thank you so much for your response @Bill Sheboy

I have tried multiple ways of configuring the automation and have not been able to get it to work with the smart value.

Any idea what I could be doing wrong?

Bill Sheboy · Answer

HI @Bridget Martin -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

You may do that with the changelog smart value: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/smart-values-general/#Smartvaluesgeneral---changelog--

For example, performing a difference on the from/to values to use in the increment:

Also, please consider adding a couple of conditions after your trigger to confirm that the from/to values are not empty...or use an if/else structure to handle those edge cases.

Kind regards,
Bill