Smart Values are not pulling into email that automation is supposed to send out.

Question

I have the following email set up to send with automation.

And the email being sent via automation works. But it comes across without any of the smart values as evidenced below.

What am I missing?

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

the way I know its working even without the information in the email is that I get the email, its just blank.

Unfortunately that only proves that the rule is running and sending an email, not that the rule is working correctly to select pages.

With your condition:

{{page.lastUpdatedDate}} < now()

...if no page is actually in context then the left side of the comparison may evaluate as 0 or null. Either of those may be considered "less than" the current date/time.

The fact that the smart values in your email print no values is indicative of the {{page}} smart value not actually referencing any page.

All the examples of using a Scheduled trigger to operate against a set of pages show some action to retrieve the pages.

Based on the documentation

https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/branches-in-confluence-automation/#Page-branch

The criteria you can set includes:

* Author: Who originally published the page.

* Date published: When the page was originally published.

* Date updated: When the page was most recently edited.

It seems that you can use it to branch based either on the original publication date or the last updated/published data. Doesn't one of those meet your requirement?

By default when you select the Page branch it will insert the criteria for Author. You have to click the trash can on the right to remove that.

Then you can click Add more criteria

...and select if you want to branch on pages based on the original publication date (Created) or the data of the last publication (Last updated)

If those don't suit your needs then you can use the Related Entities branch and construct a Confluence Query Language statement to select the pages against which you want to operate.

I hope that information is helpful.

(Note that I am leveraging my knowledge of Automation for Jira and review of the Automation for Confluence documentation to derive my conclusions about what Automation for Confluence does with branches, conditions, and smart values.)

Collista Lewingdon · Answer

@Trudy P Claspill the way I know its working even without the information in the email is that I get the email, its just blank.

What we are attempting to do is set up an audit email that is actually for every ten months, but in the rule we have it set up to 2 days for testing purposes.

I thought I would need to do the branch as well but could not get the branch to be constructed to view the published date and send the email based off of that.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

How do you know it is working if the email content doesn't include any identifying information about the pages?

Can you explain the purpose of this rule?

It appears that you are trying to look for pages that have not been updated for more than 2 days and then send an email with information identifying that page.

If I have understood that correctly, then your rule is not constructed properly.

Disclaimer: I have not worked with Automation Rules in Confluence, so what follows is what I have gleaned from the documentation.

A Schedule trigger in confluence does not get the pages against which the rule will run. You need to use some component after the schedule to select the pages that you want. And an Advanced Compare is applicable only once you already have the page selected.

I blieve what you need after your Scheduled trigger is a For Page branch, with the Send Email action nested under the branch.

https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/branches-in-confluence-automation/#Page-branch