Looking for help with smart values in automation rule

Question

Hello All,

I am looking for some help to create an automation rule to update historic tickets, where my custom field "Last comment DateTime" gets updated with the last comment date and time from historic tickets, one condition is there is one jira user group, the comment should not be from any members of that group.

Can you help me with this please?

Thanks!

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Leena Siddamshetty

Short answer: because solutions for this are complicated and risky, perhaps consider ignoring the historical issues and only set the "Last Comment DateTime" field for newly added comments.

To do what you ask, the rule would need to:

* iterate over the comments in an issue,
* filtering to remove those where the author is in your group membership, and
* capture the maximum date / time value of the comments remaining

That cannot be done with basic iteration because the group members would not be visible inside of the iterator for filtering.  This is a known limitation of rule iterators.

Theoretically there are four, equally challenging ways to solve this.  Each has limitations that may prevent this from working.

* For one single issue, use a recursive rule with an Incoming Webhook Trigger to iterate through the comments until the value is found.  This would only work for one issue, and could hit the limits for rule looping.
* Use a very complicated, dynamic list search, where a regular expression is built and used to exclude any comments with authors not in the group
* Outside of Jira, build your own service which can perform the lookup and set the field, using the REST API endpoints, and call that service from a rule using the Send Web Request action
* Investigate marketplace apps which can perform such analysis to create a calculated field for the data found in Jira

Kind regards,
Bill

Leena Siddamshetty · Answer

Hi Trudy,

Thank you for response. I have created my rule as below and it works fine, my ask for help is to include condition "there is one jira user group, the comment should not be from any members of that group."

If comment is from any member of that Jira group, it should not be counted in the comment count. How do we achieve that? Any suggestions in that please?

Leena Siddamshetty · Answer

Hi Trudy,

Thank you for response. I have created my rule as below and it works fine, my ask for help is to include condition "there is one jira user group, the comment should not be from any members of that group."

If comment is from any member of that Jira group, it should not be counted in the comment count. How do we achieve that? Any suggestions in that please?