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@mentions in automation smart values shows accountid instead of name

Jarlen Caden

Hi, not sure if anyone has an answer to this, but hoping there is a workaround.

I currently use Jira automation for a lot of things, including sending emails based on triggered events. In one example, I will send the description of a newly created issue to my email address. Another example, I will send the body of a comment to a specific email.

In the first case, I use the {{issue.description}} smart value. If someone @mentions someone the description, it translates as [~accountid:xxxxxxxxxxxxx] (xxx's are the account id) in the email that gets sent. Is there a way that instead we can show the user name instead of account ID? Does anyone know if this is possible?

Thanks!

Accepted answers

Paul Benati_d8dur6

All -- I've been trying to improve on the great work above, but to no avail until I stumbled upon this little gem: {{issue.comment.last.body.text}}. This, at least for my use case, does the trick. I hope it works for you as well.

Reference: https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/convert-wiki-markup-to-html-or-plain-text-in-jira-automation/

All comments

Bill Sheboy

Hi @Jarlen Caden

Short answer: not with the way mentions are implemented.

One work-around is to call the REST API to get the user's information using the accountId from the mention, and then you have the displayName, emailAddress, etc.

If you want to try that, here is a how-to article for calling the REST API from a rule: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-articles/Automation-for-Jira-Send-web-request-using-Jira-REST-API/ba-p/1443828

And the method to call to get the user's information is: https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/jira/platform/rest/v3/api-group-users/#api-rest-api-3-user-get

Kind regards,
Bill

Jarlen Caden

Hey @Bill Sheboy

Thanks for the quick reply! I didn't know about the web request option -- that's pretty cool and something I may leverage in future for other things. For this, though, I would need to get that info and then search/replace accountid in description with the returned value from the web request. As good as automation is, I don't think it can do that level of string replacement.

I may have to put this in as a feature request maybe.

thanks,
Jarlen

Darryl Lee

Yeah, it's kind of annoying that you can do the reverse (programmatically generate a mention from an Account ID), like so:

[~accountid:{{Squad leader.accountId}}]

https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-smart-values-users/

But I actually do think Automation is capable of this, albeit it is UGLY.

Here's how you might be able to do it:

1. Make a web request to grab user properties getting the Account ID of the @mention by using the match() function. (Note, this will be complicated if there are multiple mentions.)

2. The results from the web request are returned in a JSON object that can be referenced like {{webResponse.body.displayName}}

3. Finally, in the body of your email, you could do a substitution of the @mention with the accountID with the Display Name using the replaceAll() function.

This is all a little gnarly and hacky (especially deal with the case of multiple mentions - see below), but technically it should be possible.

Here's the reference for text functions I mentioned: Automation Text Field Functions

And maybe, just maybe, you can iterate through what match() returns to handle multiple mentions? Hrm, but can you have more than one web request? How would you distinguish the separate results? Tricky.

There's discussion about of the Advanced Branching which might enable this here: Branching over smart values in Jira Automation

Hmm...@Bill Sheboy can you include Smart Values in a replaceAll() replacement strings?

Can we maybe set Smart Value "variables" and use those? Hum, wouldn't be able to change the variable names though (mention1, mention2, etc.) because I don't think variable names can be built from Smart Values... Or maybe they can?

Might be fun to try and see. :-}

Bill Sheboy

You can use the match() function with a regular expression to get the accountId, and then pass that as a parameter for the REST API call.

Bill Sheboy

Hi @Darryl Lee !

In my experience, use of smart values in functions is still inconsistently implemented. And rarely do created variables work as function parameters. The work-around is using replaceAll() and chained functions with substringAfter(), and so forth, to get at the desired values.

Jarlen Caden

Thanks @Darryl Lee @Bill Sheboy

This may work, but you're right, it gets complicated with multiple @ mentions (and it's rare, in my experience, that there is just one). I'll dive more into it and explore what can be done. I like the direction you both give though -- this may help lead me to the solution I'm looking for.

Darryl Lee

Heh yeah, I've gotten as far as extracting mention accountids and looking up the display names, but then I'm trying to generate an email body thusly and it's failing:

{{issue.description.replace.("~accountId:".mentionId,webResponse.body.displayName)}}

So I guess you're saying we'll need to do something like finding all the text up to the first mention (using a match), and then include that, then the display name of the first mention.... and then ooof, figure out all the text between that mention and the next mention, and then the next mention, and then anything after the last mention? Yuuuuuck. :-}

Paul Benati_d8dur6

Reference: https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/convert-wiki-markup-to-html-or-plain-text-in-jira-automation/

Jarlen Caden

@Paul Benati Thanks for sharing! That solution works and is exactly what I was looking for! I used {{issue.comment.last.body.html}} and it not only shows the name, but it also translates all the HTML too, so that was an added bonus. Thanks again.

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