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Automation - Send Email to Issue's Watchers

Keiko Kamiya

Hello,

I am trying to set up an email alert for issues that are due within a time frame. I am able to make it work to send an email to the assignee and CC the respective reporter. However, I am not able to make it work to CC the watchers of the issue. Here are the screenshots:

It is logging the watchers' email addresses, but I do not see them listed in the CC header. Any help is appreciated. Thank you!

Accepted answers

Shaik Riyaz

Hi @Keiko Kamiya,

This happens because the Lookup issues action only returns standard indexed fields from JQL search results. Watchers are stored as a separate sub-resource (/rest/api/3/issue/{key}/watchers) and are not retrieved by lookupIssues, so {{lookupIssues.watchers}} evaluates to empty/null. Additionally, watchers are multi-value lists, which creates nested list parsing issues in smart values.

All comments

Matthew Sinclair

Observation - the whole point of a "Watcher" is any time a ticket moves - they see it.

Why not just simply put a comment in the ticket - they get a notification by definition at that point?

Keiko Kamiya

This is certainly a better approach, but they prefer it in an email.

Matthew Sinclair

@Keiko Kamiya pardon my snarky smarty goomba personality

"They already get an email for it"

(cough)

You can custom tailor the comment for the notification they are getting to begin with as well - but I digress.

To answer you question

May have to do a

{{#lookupIssues}}
  {{watchers.emailAddress}};
{{/}}

Note you may have to escape the ";" (Been a min since I did this)

For your email field it would be

{{#lookupIssues}}{{watchers.emailAddress}};{{/}}

As your iterating a list - and the inference your attempting to use may not be playing nice.

Other suggestion to escape the hell that is "lookupissue looping" - Maybe dump the list into one long string "custom variable" separated by semicolons into the CC field - see if that doesn't help remove the road block. So you can just simply "dump" the list preformated into the field. As a string is just a string.

Only one other work around that comes to mind is custom notification/event handlers (requires tinkering with Workflow) but then again - watchers by itself would suffice quite nicely.

In any case - Hope this helps. 😁

PS: I've had to do Jira tickets that parsed OpsGenie Alerts from JSM - may or may not have lost 4-5 hours of my life to this. (No thanks to Gemini lying to me about "Else" being a Smart Value thing)

Josh

Hi @Keiko Kamiya, I think the rule is working and the CC header is the misleading part. Atlassian's automation docs for Send customized email say: "Recipients receive separate emails and will not see other recipient addresses."

So each watcher gets their own copy, and nobody (including the assignee) sees the others in To or CC. The audit log listing the watchers' addresses is the confirmation. Ask one of them to check their inbox, spam folder included, and you'll know for sure.

If the business ask is "everyone should see who else got it", add a line to the body instead, e.g. Also sent to: {{issue.watchers.displayName}}. Smart values work in the body, so that list stays accurate for each work item.

Doc (Send customized email section): https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-automation-actions/

Matthew Sinclair

You may have to "iterate" the watchers list in the body - as one call out may not be sufficient if there's more than one.

Akin to my loop suggestion - may need to poke Rovo to Confirm - things get a little weird when dealing with lists.

Shaik Riyaz

Hi @Keiko Kamiya,

Recommended solutions:

Send per-issue alerts instead of a digest (Easiest):
- Change your rule to use a Branch rule / For each: JQL using your criteria.
- Inside the branch, it runs on the active {{issue}} context, where watchers are supported:
  - Cc: {{issue.reporter.emailAddress}}, {{issue.watchers.emailAddress.join(", ")}}
If you must keep the digest:
- Use a custom User Picker (multiple users) field instead of native watchers. Unlike watchers, custom user fields are returned by lookupIssues:
  - {{#lookupIssues}}{{#YourCustomField}}{{emailAddress}}, {{/}}{{/}}

Thanks!!

Keiko Kamiya

Thank you all for your help! After your input and digging a little deeper, I realized the audit log was showing: [abc@company.com], [xyz@company.com, cba@company.com] so I needed to create a variable for the {{lookupIssues.watchers.emailAddress}} before the send email action and cc'ed the variable + remove function to convert the array into a comma-separated string:

It now properly email the respective watchers.

Matthew Sinclair

Be careful of your Automation Costs - if you have a heavy traffic space - its going to ramp up your meters.

Happy automating!

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