Automation: Parse List of Emails into User-Picker

Question

Does anybody have suggestions on how to use project automation parse a list of emails addresses in a text field to populate a multi-user picker field?

Since we can't pass in email addresses through the API I'm trying to avoid forcing the integration teams to do extra work and instead use automation to perform that task.

Mikael Sandberg · Answer

Here is an example of an automation that I have that adds users to a multi user picker field.

For the API call you can take the returned result and do something similar, just assign the list of email addresses to a smart value and then you can use the for each smart value branch and then in that branch make the web request to get the Atlassian Id and then assign that to the field.

Mathew Lederman · Answer

@Mikael Sandberg appreciate the response. And apologies in advance if I sound a bit frustrated. Our Cloud migration is not going well because of issues like this that are not an issue in Datacenter.

Thankfully Single-user picker fields will accept email address, it's just multi-user picker and a few other select fields that won't (like Request Participants, the original purpose of this whole process). As email address is a globally recognized unique identifier it seems a little silly that Atlassian won't accept it.

My list is as follows: email@domain.com,email2@domain.com,email3@domain.com  Maybe this doesn't qualify as a list?

Can you point me to (useful) documentation or examples of passing a list from a custom field into a smart value? I can't find any examples other than this which either I'm not smart enough to understand, or it's not all that useful.

I'm trying this: {{issue.get(0).customField_40201}} and then pass that Smart Value into the Audit Log and the Description field, both yield no results.

Then I guess I have to make an API call to get the accountID and then pass that into the Request Participants field?  I can follow these instructions here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Service-Management-articles/Populate-a-user-picker-field-from-the-description-field/ba-p/2134905.

Mikael Sandberg · Answer

User picker fields will only accept the Atlassian Id of the user, so one way of doing it is to use the Find user endpoint, this will return the Atlassian Id if the user exists. Since you want to do this for a list I would convert the list to a smart value that you can then user in a branch to get the Atlassian Id and add them to the field.