How can I assign a User Field using displayName in Jira Cloud Automation with Advanced Field Editing

Question

Hello Atlassian community,

I have a cascading select list that contains group names and users associated with these groups. I have identified the users by their displayName. What I want to do is assign a User field based on the selected user here. I'm planning to do this using Advanced Field Editing in Jira Cloud Automation. However, the issue is that due to GDPR, it only accepts the accountId. Is there a way for me to make this assignment based on displayName or to access the user's accountId through displayName?

Thanks in advance...

Bill Sheboy · Answer

There are several community posts on this scenario, including this one: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Automation-questions/mentions-in-automation-smart-values-shows-accountid-instead-of/qaq-p/2188200

For more details / actions:

* call the REST API function to get the user (or all users), pausing until the results return* get user: https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/jira/platform/rest/v2/api-group-users/#api-rest-api-2-user-get
* or, get all users: https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/jira/platform/rest/v2/api-group-users/#api-rest-api-2-users-search-get

* review the results to understand the layout; you can do this by writing the response to the audit log
* using the smart value, list filtering info I provided, filter to get the user for the displayName; this will probably require using a regular expression
* from the filtered results, you will have the accountId value

Yavuz Selim Parmaksiz · Answer

Hello @Bill Sheboy ,

I've used Webhook before, but I'm not sure how I should go about this process.
Can you explain the API call and then filtering the results in a bit more detail?

Kind Regards, Yavuz

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Yavuz Selim Parmaksiz

I believe there are at least a couple of ways to do this:

* slower, and always works: call a REST API function with a web request, and filter on the results to get the user and their accountId
* faster, and may not work: assuming the user has previously been assigned to your field in an issue, you can find an example issue with JQL to populate a Lookup Issues action, and then reference them in your edit to set by accountId.  The reason this may not work is if the user has never been assigned.* For example JQL, let's assume the user has been assigned to an issue
* project = myProjectName AND assignee IN ("{{issue.yourFieldWithDisplayName}}")
* Then use the lookup results with {{lookupIssues.first.assignee.accountId}}

Kind regards,
Bill