How do external tools set user values through the API?

Question

How do external tools (example: Postman) set user-based fields like Reporter, Assignee, Request Participants, Single-user fields, multi-user fields, etc. when the API does not accept email address? How are these other tools expected to know the user ID? I feel like I'm missing something because only accepting user ID doesn't seem functional for 90% of scenarios.

Mathew Lederman · Answer

@Trudy P Claspill does this not seem a bit crazy to you? What other system do you have to GET information in order to PUT information? I have many teams that are completely or mostly broken because they can't simply pass the assignee email through the API like they could in Datacenter. Adding a GET to their process would significantly decrease the speed and impact of any work they need to do.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @Mathew Lederman

Your process would need to include a call to the API to get the ID for the user based on searching the users for one with the specified email address, and extract the account ID from the response.

https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/jira/platform/rest/v3/api-group-user-search/#api-rest-api-3-user-search-get