Adding Multiple users for Approval with automation

[Aaron Geister]

I am using Automation for Jira in JSM Cloud. I need to have a field drop down be able to be selected and each time a value is selected it then add an approver to the approval field. So if 5 values selected it will then add 5 different users as approvers.

Each value in drop down is a department and each department as a representative that is the approver.

I am using the if else for each value to make the change to the approver field but it seems it will only add on approver to the field not multiple.

Anyone else have this before. I have all approvers selected in the approval process.

[Moshe Quantz · Accepted solution]

I managed to do so with dynamic values like so:

[Julian Governale]

@Moshe Quantz Does "add" operator still work for you?

Im trying to do the same, but using add doesn't populate the approver fields for us.  We need to use "fields" but i can only set one array of users

[William Atkins · Accepted solution]

Often when configuring approval workflows, we typically pull the manager information from a user’s profile and assign the approval task to said manager. This is a typical use case for a vacation request form. However, this is not always the use case where approver details are static.

[Aaron Geister]

I agree with you. I usually create automation for approvals but in this case there is a total of 15 departments that are being request to approve with 15 approvers which will make this a total of 225 outcomes in an automation. I can't see any other way to do this other then making those edits in a if else statement. I think that would be rather to much and I have moved to ask the stakeholders to ask the users to add appropriate approver or have a agent add the approvers base on a matrix. I am not sure how else to do this in this situation. I believe that they are asking Jira to do something it is not able to do.

[SheshaChandra]

@William Atkins , I have a use case to add the requester's manager as an approver when a ticket is created. 

Can you please let me know if you are using any webhooks to achieve this? 

[Aaron Geister]

no webhook. I have configured this a different way and allowed the users to pick the respective users to add to the issues as approvers.

I figured that if I did this with automation I would need 225 variation to make it work correctly based on the field selection.

[Carlos Faddul · Accepted solution]

Hello @Aaron Geister 

If you need to add multiple approvers in the same status, select the option below. (Remember that your approver field must be multiple users)

Then, you can use the "Consider approved after"

→ All aprovals - all your users MUST approve the issue, however, even if approved by any user, the issue will be pending approval until EVERYONE approves it. (complicates life for approving users)

→ N approvals - in this you can set the number for approval. Example: if you have 5 approvers and the limit set for 3 approvals, 2 approvers deny and 3 approve, your issue will be approved). (But it is also in the queue for those who have already approved the issue.)

Using the best pratices, if each person must be approve, increase your workflow to supports more steps to approvals :)

[Aaron Geister]

This is what I have told the stakeholders. To have multiple step approval but they want to automate the approval process and get all people who approve to just get the approval notification and approve.

I have it set to all approve at this time but I can not get the automation to push to add more approvers based on the field selected.

Commercial = approve 1

Tech =  approval 2
etc

In the automation I am adding Affect group values and then adding the person that is suppose to be the approver to the list of approvers. It is editing the approvers but only adding one approver. I need it to add all approvers to the approval field.

[Aaron Geister]

To make this simplier in idea is that they don't want people to remember who the approver is and add them to the field they want a field selected and the automation add the users to the approval. Hope this makes sense.

[Carlos Faddul]

What would be the impact of defining the sequence of approvers based on areas like you mentioned, commercial, tech etc?
It will be easier to define the approvers in each step as reuse the same field in all the steps.
The advantage of using different statuses is that you can define SLA's even for each step of your process, this way you can know who delayed the process or not :)

[Aaron Geister]

I agree with you but the stakeholders do not agree with us. SLA is only important to them for the first response and they want a process that is automated for the approval of the issue so its less thought to the user requesting the change.

[Tyler Simecek]

Were you ever able get the automation to add each approver to the the approvers field or is it still only adding 1? I am having the same issue and looking for a solution. 

[Matt Lane]

I found I had to use branches within the same automation rule, if I wanted to add more than one Approver to the Approvers field.

A branch within the rule for each user you potentially want to add as an Approver is not ideal. But this is how I got it to work in the scenario I had.

And when adding them, using the 'Edit issue' action in each branch of the rule, I had to use the Additional fields area with following JSON command, and provide the Atlassian user account ID for the relevant Approver I wanted to add in the Approvers list:

[Mergim Rexha]

@Matt Lane your solution works for me. It now adds more approvers. The only problem I still have is that it approves the ticket when only one approves the ticket. But really all approvers would have to approve the ticket, when there are more then one approver. Do you have a solution for this as well?

[Matt Lane]

@Mergim Rexha  you would just need to configure the status in the workflow where you want the approval step to occur, to ensure its set to requiring all approvers to approve. I think the default setting when using the Approvers (multi approver user-picker) field, only requires one approval for the approve step to occur. But you should be able to change that to be ALL or more than 1 approval needed. If you aren't sure how, I'm certain there is likely topics and documentation on how to adjust your settings for an approval step in a workflow.

[Mergim Rexha]

Thank you. I change it to ALL and now it works

[Aaron Geister]

I was thinking that this would add each users based on the if else but its only allowing the edit of issue to be one users as approver. I need it to add each person as an approver.