How to copy the reporter's group name into a custom field using web request

[#1]

Summary

Overall, to perform the action of populating a custom field with the reporter's group is usually using a bunch of "if/else" conditions to first catch who the reporter is and then filter what group the reporter belongs to; it can be exhausting to add new components every time a group is created, and this may become impracticable if you have hundreds (or thousands) of groups - there's no scalability here and lots of manual work. Based on this, I'm presenting a simple way to solve this without having so many conditions using automation and a web request.

Suggestion

Overall, it'll look like this:

1 - Set up when the rule is triggered using any of the automation triggers available.
2 - Then, send a web request to the endpoint below:

https://<YOUR_SITE>.atlassian.net/rest/api/3/user/groups?accountId={{reporter.accountId}}

With the headers:

• Authorization
  • In this authorization step, you need to create an API Token in the URL https://id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/security/api-tokens:
  • After the API Token is created, you need to encode it to base64, as you can see here:

For Linux/Unix/MacOS use:

echo -n YOUR_EMAIL@example.com:<API_TOKEN_HERE> | base64

Windows 7 and later, using Microsoft Powershell:

$Text = ‘YOUR_EMAIL@example.com:<API_TOKEN_HERE>’
$Bytes = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes($Text)
$EncodedText = [Convert]::ToBase64String($Bytes)
$EncodedText

 You just need to run the commands above in the respective terminal of your operating system.

Also, don't forget to add the "Basic" and then the encoded token.

• The content type it'll be just exactly as in the screenshot: Content-Type application/json
• The HTTP method is GET because the rull will just read the results, and the Web request body is Empty
• It's important to set the option "Delay execution of subsequent rule actions until we've received a response for this web request" marked too

3 - After the web request, you need to add an action of 'Edit fields,' select the field that it'll be populated, and set the smart value as:

{{webhookResponse.body.name}}

It's done! 
It may seem a bit complicated to set, but you won't need all of the conditions, and you also gain the scalability to create new groups without adding a component.

[Dan_Tombs]

We actually did something similar for around controlling who could or couldn't make database access requests or what databases they could. We had a lot of contractors in a previous role and had a group per company etc. Based on the returned value we were able to assign specific field values and then ultimately a yes no.

[Tomislav Tobijas]

This is cool, but I guess this gets all the groups the user is currently in (including default ones). One of our clients is using groups as 'teams' within organizations and we would need to populate a field based on the 'team' group the user is currently in.

However, as the user is always in multiple groups - for example, jira-software-users and such, this wouldn't be an option. Only if we would parse this result in some way and get/input everything except these default groups 🤔