Help with smart value for comments that start with a number

Question

For End of Sprint Updates, seeing that you can't create a custom comment field, I'd like to copy the last comment IF it starts with a 4 digit number (the sprint number) to a custom field called Sprint Update. I'm struggling to get an automation to work for this though.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to make the automation work or any other better solutions? I don't want the spreadsheet where the update goes to becoming a wall of text as each update accumulates. But, I also don't want to lose the history by overwriting the previous update.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Jennifer Neusch_1reszv · Answer

Thank you so much for your response and I apologize for my delayed response. What I ended up doing is using a text field for Sprint Update and also created a timestamp field for when that is updated. Because the details get saved in the history, they can then write over the previous sprint update (as the previous one won't be lost) so that the most current one is all that's shown. But, it's also easy to see when it was last updated by the timestamp custom field.

This ended up seeming to be the cleanest way to do it. But, I learned a lot in exploring ways including your suggestion above!

Valerie Knapp_dpp5c6 · Answer

Hi @Jennifer Neusch , welcome to the Atlassian Community and thanks for your question.

Do you have an automation rule you're already working on? Or would you be starting from scratch?

I think it should be possible to use a combination of these two pages here -

https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-smart-values-issues/

To get the last comment body {{issue.comments.last.body}}

And then here, you can abbreviate the field and apply is numeric condition - https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/examples-of-using-smart-values-with-text-strings/

I'm not sure about tagging the isNumeric there on the end, but please have a go with this and share your feedback.

If you can provide the audit log view, we can try to see what is happening if something is going wrong.

Ok, good luck and let us know how you get on.

Cheers