Use email address from description and set it as request participant

[Mehran Ahmadi]

Hi all,

how can I use/copy an email address which is mentioned in the description and set it as a request participant via automation?

The e-mail address is written like below.

E-Mail Adresse =...

Thank you for your time and attention,
I do appreciate your feedback.

Kind Regards Mehran

[Darryl Lee]

@Bruno Altenhofen wrote a whole article on how to do exactly what you're trying.

• Populate a user picker field from the description field 

Sorry about the earlier journey to get to the exact same place.

[Darryl Lee]

Hi @Mehran Ahmadi -

So I think this should work, using the match operator for smart values:

{{issue.description.match(".*E-Mail Adresse =(.+).*")}}

Ah, one catch is that I entered an email address via the GUI, which converted it into a link. So my code above extracts the address as Jira markup for the "link":

[test@notarealemaildomain.com|mailto:test@notarealemaildomain.com]

So I revised the smart value to only parse the text version of the description:

{{issue.description.text.match(".*E-Mail Adresse =(.+).*")}}

And this only returned the email address:

test@notarealemaildomain.com

FYI, for testing this, I used a Manual trigger and used the automation audit log. This is a really powerful way to debug automation rules. There's good details on this here:

• Debug an automation rule 

[Darryl Lee]

Oh, because I have a tried lot of add-ons that generated service accounts, I did want to show how you might need to scroll through list of accounts before you can see the Smart Value at the bottom of the list when trying to use it for Request participants. 

[Darryl Lee]

Ugh. Further complications.

I think Request Participants cannot be added by email!

When trying to add an active user by email address, I'm seeing this in my logs: 

Inactive user

                fb-test@darryl.com

So uh, that's not great. Oooof, of course the estimable  @Bill Sheboy has already run into this issue. 

• Automation to Add Request Participant from Email field 

So... the big question here is, is the email address in the Description an existing Customer or User, or a new Customer?

If it is a new Customer, then you could possibly follow instructions on that question to create a new Customer, do a couple of Re-fetches, and then grab the Customer accountId to add it as a Request Participant.

Unfortunately probably due to GDPR, I don't think there is a way to lookup the accountId of an existing user or customer by email. Does that sound right to you, Bill?

[Darryl Lee]

Ugh, I spoke too soon. There is a way with the Find Users API:

https://YOURSITE/rest/api/3/user/search?query=fb-test@darryl.com

So then, this rule got a lot more complicated, because you'll need to use a Web request action to the Jira API to try looking up the email address to see if it has a corresponding accountId, and if so, adding to the issue that using Advanced editing with JSON.

Wait wait! @Bruno Altenhofen wrote a whole article on how to do exactly what you're trying.

• Populate a user picker field from the description field 

Wow, I could've saved myself a lot of time just linking to that!