Can I have a Jira automation to look for dates from a table's column on a Confluence page?

Question

Hey There,
I'd like to set up an automation in Jira that pulls dates from a company Confluence page's table's certain column and triggers status changes on the exact dates that appears on the page.

MS Copilot suggests it's possible, however, I'd need to access the Confluence REST API to get the page content. And this is where I'm stuck.

Currently, I have the automation set up based on an 11 month recurrence (with the Schedule Trigger node + JQL query), and I have the Then node that takes care of the status transitioning, but this eventually go stale, as the future dates aren't always followed in an 11 month cadence.

Can you please help me figure out at which point in the chain and how do I need to call the above mentioned page in the Confluence REST API?

Mate Moldovan · Answer

Thank you Philipp, I appreciate your detailed comment, this should be enough to get me on the right track!

Philipp Sendek _catworkx_ · Answer

Hi @Mate Moldovan,

you will have a few challenges to face along the way.
One this is to authenticate against Confluence's REST API which you'll need to do with the credentials of a user that has access to the pages.
Once you've tackled that, you'll also need to know the ID of the page you're accessing. If that's always the same, great! :-)

And then there's the fact that Confluence pages are simple XHTML/XML, so you would have to use Automation features to pull the response from the REST endpoint that pulls the whole page content and then parse through that to find your table, the cell with your date and extract the date.
As you don't really have any libraries in the Automation that would support parsing the page, this can be quite challenging.

If you would like to have a go at it, here are the documentation pages that should help you:
Access Confluence page via REST: https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/confluence/rest/v2/api-group-page/#api-pages-id-get
Authentication in REST API: https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/confluence/rest/v2/intro/#auth

Running a webhook from an Automation: https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/jira/service-desk/automation-webhooks/

String parsing in Jira Automations: https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-smart-values-text-fields/

I hope this helps!

Greetings
Philipp