How to capture issue transition date of existing issues in JIRA through Automation

Question

I know we can set automation rules that will work on the issues that are getting updated after making the automation live for them, is there any way we can run the automation rule for existing issues?

In particular, I need to capture the date of a workflow transition for Defects created on a board from Jan'24 to Mar'24

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Shubham R

That information is in the issue history, but it is difficult to access using automation rules.  This is one reason marketplace addons often help with this need.

It may be possible to get that date using an automation rule, but first let's check the extent of this need:

* Create a JQL query to find the issues of interest and which do not have that transition date preserved.  If it is fewer than about 10 issues, it may be easier to do this manually by reviewing each issue's history and manually recording the date.
* If there are more than 100 issues, check how actively they have been updated.  If they have had more than 100 updates each, they cannot be checked using an automation rule, as described below.
* If there are more than 500 issues, I recommend talking to your site admin about the possibility of using a marketplace addon for this update / refresh...even if it is only for a trial period.

Assuming there are several issues, and they have not had too many updates, a rule could be built as follows:

* trigger: scheduled once per day, checking if the update field is empty
* action: use the Send Web Request action to call the REST API function to get the change log histories
* smart value condition: check if the call succeeded
* action: create a variable to capture the date, parsing the {{webhookResponse}} to find the date in the histories
* smart value condition: check if the date was found
* action: edit issue, to save the date value

This rule could be allow to run until all of the values are captured, and then the rule could be disabled.

Kind regards,
Bill

Ditte Simard · Answer

Hi @Shubham R !

I would recommend using the "Scheduled" trigger to immediately run the automation on all of your existing issues.  After the automation has been run, you should change the trigger to be what would work best for your use case (maybe keep it as Scheduled but make it less frequent, change the trigger to be when the issue transitions to a specific state, and so on).

I hope this helps!