Bulk updating date field based on comment text and date

Chris Ripley-Duggan

Hi all,

We have a custom "Publication Date" field that I'm attempting to bulk populate. I'm looking to set that field to the date that a comment was added which features a particular URL.

 

I've already created a project-based automation to achieve this going forward, but now wondering if I can bulk update the ~300 existing tasks...I have a horrible feeling I cannot, but thought I would ask! Thank you!

Trudy P Claspill

Hello @Chris Ripley-Duggan 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

I believe you can do this with a Scheduled automation rule.

Create a rule with the Schedule trigger and add to it a JQL that selects the issues you want to review. Uncheck the box that says to only pick issues that have changed since the last time the rule ran. It doesn't matter what schedule you set as long as it is in the future. You will be running the rule once manually and then disabling it.

 

Then add a For Each Advanced branch that will let you iterate through each issues comments.

Within the For Each branch add a Condition to check the comment body for the URL. Here I'm checking just for the presence of the text keyword.

This assumes you will have only one comment that has the matching text.

And then, still within the For Each branch, add an Edit action to edit the field in the issue using the created attribute of the comment. Here I just used a Log action to log the information to the rule audit log.

 

You will likely have to apply some formatting to the created data to get it in the right format to insert into the field in the issue.

 

After publishing the rule you can click the Run Rule button to run it immediately. After it completes, you can this disable it so it won't run again.

The For Each branch will be executed against each issue that is returned by the JQL in the Scheduled trigger.