How to auto-add watcher from the person at in the latest comment?

[yztech]

I comment a jira as follows:

hi @Lily @Tom  it's a lovely day, isn't it?

I want to use jira automation to add lily and tom as the watchers, but don't know how to fulfill this. Could any guy help?

Thanks,

Craig

[Bill Sheboy · Accepted solution]

Hi @yztech 

Until that suggestion is implemented, you could built this functionality yourself using Automation for Jira.  For example:

• trigger: issue commented
• action: create a variable, and use text functions and regular expressions to extract the mentioned users account id values
• condition: advanced compare to check if there were any mentions
• advanced branch: to iterate over the created variable as a list
  • action: add watchers for each mentioned user

To learn more about automation rules, please see this documentation and examples:

• https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/guides/expand-jira/automation
• https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/automation-template-library#/label/all/1453
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Automation-articles/Jira-Automation-all-the-resources-you-need-in-one-page/ba-p/1388465

Kind regards,
Bill

[Kit Friend]

Hey @Bill Sheboy  - I'm a newbie to variable writing - do you have an example of what the action would look like here? We're trying to achieve the same thing

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Kit Friend 

Here are more details on what I described to extract the account id values from the comments...

• trigger: issue commented
• action: create variable...
  • name: varAddWatcher
  • smart value: 

{{issue.comments.last.body.split(" ").match("(accountid:.*)]").remove("accountid:")}}

• advanced compare condition: check if {{varAddWatcher}} does not equal empty
• advanced branch...
  • smart value: {{varAddWatcher.split(",")}}
  • variable name: varWatcher
    • action: manage watchers
      • add these watchers: {{varWatcher}}

Kind regards,
Bill

UPDATED 2023-Feb-06: I updated the expression for varAddWatcher to split on spaces before searching for the accountId values.

[Kit Friend]

Thanks @Bill Sheboy really kind of you!

[Kit Friend]

@Bill Sheboy have you had this working successfully for multiple users being tagged? It's working fine for me on single users, but errors when there's more than one. I'm wondering if it's to do with the initial variable creation action only creating the first one as a smart value...

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Kit Friend 

Here is the fix below.  This rule which I believed worked in the past stopped working when there were multiple mentions on the same text line.  The improvement below first splits the comment by spaces into separate lines, and then tests each entry to find the accountId.

{{issue.comments.last.body.split(" ").match("(accountid:.*)]").remove("accountid:")}}

I tested this successfully for a few scenarios; please let me know if you see any other problems with it.

Thanks,
Bill

[yztech]

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-21006