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Automation-populate a user picker field from email body

Benjamin Leidner

Hello community-

I am so close to completing this automation but am hitting a wall on the final piece.

We get an email from our HR system that generates a Jira ticket. We currently manually fill in the fields of the ticket based on the data in in this email. But I don't want to do that anymore

I have successfully set up the rules to parse the body of the email and populate the appropriate fields. This is the body of the email:

Name: Jonathan Doe
Company: Our Company, LLC.
Group: Information Technology
Start Date: 5/1/2023
Supervisor: Benjamin Franklin
Title: Vice President
Location: New York

I parsed every line to populate the relevant fields but I cannot figure out how to populate the Supervisor field. It is a User Picker field (we synch our directory with Azure AD) and will also be the initial assignee of the ticket. I know Jira uses their own Atlassian ID string to reference user accounts so... Is this even possible?

Thanks!

-Ben

Accepted answers

Simmo_9kntn7

Hi @Benjamin Leidner,

Can you get their email address? It might be possible to use that to set the Supervisor?

Cheers,

Simeon.

All comments

Simmo_9kntn7

Hi @Benjamin Leidner,

Can you get their email address? It might be possible to use that to set the Supervisor?

Cheers,

Simeon.

John Funk

Simeon beat me to it! We always have an exterior app send the user’s email address. Then that works like a charm.

Benjamin Leidner

Thanks both of you for your replies. Alas, our HR system is woefully inadequate. I'll ask if they can add an email address but it was like pulling teeth just getting them to send us an email in the first place. If I import all the users into "Assets" can I do some sort of lookup to there? Or... This would only be about 95% accurate but can I use a regex to create an email from the email that HR provided? Something like: Grab the last name (last word of that line) plus the first initial from the word before, concatenate, and append our domain (@company.com)? I know, it's kludgy, but it's all I've got to work with

John Funk

I think you are only asking for trouble doing that. Either HR wants to be a part of the solution or not. I would escalate that upwards if they don't. There's no reason for that type of siloed behavior in my opinion. I would expend your energy on that versus trying to work around them.

Mark Mahacek

I'm looking to do this too. Can you share more details on your final solution?

Benjamin Leidner

Hi Mark. Sure. It is all done through Automation (Projects / <project name> / Project settings / Automation):

01-Automation step 01.jpg

02-Automation step 02.jpg

NOTE: In my case, The text of the Supervisor email is between “Email:” and “Title” as above but this depends on the text of the email you receive. Here is a snippet of the email I receive from HR…

Supervisor Email: BFRANKLIN@mycompany.com

Title: Intern

ALSO NOTE: if the supervisor email address is a hyperlink, the automation may choke on the HTML so try to ensure the email is text format or the email address is not a hyperlink.

The next step in the automation is to query Jira cloud for the username of the supervisor, based on the smart variable “username” defined above.

03-Automation step 03.jpg

You will need to add a header named “Authorization” with the value of

Basic APIKEYABCDEFG!@#$%^&...

Info on creating an API key may be found here but the API key must be base64 encoded. I use this website to do that. Enter the email address you used to create the API key, a space, then the API key and click to Base64 Encode. The result is what you add in the header above after the word Basic.

04-Automation step 04.jpg

The final step in the automation is to Edit the issue fields you want with the API call result. I populate the “New Hire Supervisor” and “Assignee” fields:

05-Automation step 05.jpg

And that's it. Hope this helps.

-Ben

Mark Mahacek

Yes. Thanks!

Benjamin Leidner

I'm reasonably new here too and still learning but happy to help. Please click the above to accept my answer. Thanks!

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