Automation: Email will not send

[Vanessa Filey]

Hello,

I am setting up an automated email to the reporter based on an approval through Jira Service Desk Automation.

When the issue is approved, it transitions (lets call it transition X) to a place holder status (status y).

Transition X has two custom post functions:

1. Update Any Issue Field (JSU)
   
   • Issue Field: Condition Field - Automation (a custom field)
   • Field Value 5
2. Follow Up Transition (JSU)

Status Y has a transition back to In Progress called Transition Z.

Transition Z has a condition to trigger the follow up transition:

1. Value Field (JSU)
   • Condition Field - Automation = 5
   • Comparison Type: Number

My Automation rule to trigger the email is as follows:

When: Status Changed

If: "Condition Field - Automation" = "5" AND "Status" = "In Progress"

Then: Send Email & Edit condition field - automation to equal 1.

The automation logs show that the rule is successful, however the test reporter that I set up is not receiving emails from this rule. It is not a case of emails not working from automation: I have two other automated emails (based on a status change and an SLA) that fire correctly every time. I have tried multiple solutions (triggering based on comment, triggering just based on status change, triggering based on different statuses) and nothing has been successful. Does anyone have any troubleshooting tips or recommendations? Could this have something to do with the approval step?

UPDATE 1/20/20:

Just to update: I've found a workaround, but it is inelegant.

The approval stage automatically transitions to the placeholder status, Status Y, with the same post condition to change the value field as above in Transition X. Status Y then has a single, manual transition to a "To Do" notification queue, which I'll call Status W. There is a final, manual transition back to In Progress.

When the ticket transitions back to In Progress from a "To Do" queue (i.e. Status W), the above automation rule works every time. I'm going to experiment with changing the placeholder status to a "To Do" type status, to see if that has any effect on the email firing, but I can say with confidence that even with manual transitions, if Status Y is an "In Progress" status, the email to the reporter above will not fire. 

If anyone finds a more elegant workaround, please let me know.

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi Vanessa,

If I understand the scenario here, Jira Service Desk's automation feature is not working as expected here when executing an approval transition that has some post functions that update specific features.  I can see that you are expecting an email notification to be triggered by this custom field value which is also being set by the first transition.

It sounds like this transition is what we call a looped transition, where the status stays the same, but you get to execute a transition complete with post-functions.  In that case, it feels like you might be in an edge case here where the automation rule is only expected to work when the status of the issue changes, but technically your issue is not changing status from what I can tell here.  If I'm understanding all these details so far, I believe that the automation aspects are technically working as designed here.

Your update to this post would seem to confirm my suspicion here, that we actually do need to change the issue status from some different value to this expected value to make that trigger work as expected.

Perhaps there is a different trigger you could use here instead of when status changes.  Maybe approval complete or approval required might be better triggers in this particular use case.  Or your alternative of actually changing the issue status might also be a valid work-around here.

Please let me know if this helps.

Andy