Automation Condition to distinguish between "reporter" and "created by" in JSM

Question

Hi All,

We have an automation that adds an itnernal comment to a work item (auto triage with rovo agent).

The automation works fine and the comments are created OK.

We have situations when internal agents create work items on behalf of customers. In these situations, the "reporter" is the customer, but the creator is the internal agent. For these work items, I do not want the automation to run.

I have the following two conditions:

(reporter not in (membersof(jira-servicedesk-users))) OR ("Customer Request Type" in (list of some request types)

AND

{{creator.emailAddress}} does not contain "@ourdomain.com"

Unfortunately, it appears that the {{creator.emailaddress}} confdition is not effective nor is the customer request types conditions are also not working.

What am I doing wrong?

Casey Gould · Answer

Another consideration I'd add to Josh's suggestion is the User who triggered the automation concept.

This will depend on how your automation is set up to trigger, but if your internal team are the ones creating the new work item, they are probably the people who performed the action that triggered your automation.

You'll see this in some automation settings as the User who triggered the automation or in smart values, the {{initiator}}. More about user smart values: https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-smart-values-users/)

There are a few different things you could check on these initiators with a user condition, like whether they're part of a particular group or role or are a customer or not. (Note: "is not customer" hasn't worked for me on internal company helpdesks where agents are also in the customer role).

George Abdo · Answer

Thanks Josh. This suggestion seems to have worked.

Josh · Answer

Hi George,

Since what you really want to know is "was this created on behalf of someone", you can skip the email check and compare the two users directly. Atlassian has a KB article for exactly this case:

https://support.atlassian.com/jira/kb/identify-requests-created-on-behalf-of-reporter/

Trigger: Work item created

Condition: Work item fields condition, field Creator, condition "equals", value "Reporter (from the current work item)"

Then your Rovo action and the internal comment.

With "equals", the rule only continues when the person who created the work item is also its reporter. When an agent raises it for a customer, Creator and Reporter are different people, so the rule stops. (The KB uses "does not equal" because it wants to flag those requests; you want the opposite.)

Why the email check fails: {{creator.emailAddress}} returns nothing if the user's email visibility in their profile is not open to you, and "does not contain" on an empty value can behave unexpectedly. This is stated on the users smart values page: https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-smart-values-users/ . Account IDs are always available, so if you prefer a smart values condition, compare {{issue.creator.accountId}} with {{issue.reporter.accountId}} using "equals".

For the request type part, I would put it in its own condition (Work item fields condition on Request Type, "is one of") rather than inside the JQL, and add a Log action with {{issue.creator.accountId}} and {{issue.reporter.accountId}} so the audit log shows what each value was on a failed run.