Automation Rule

[Levi Stone]

Hello,

First off I must say that I am no Jira expert in the least, so please bear with me.  An employee who was our Jira admin left the company and had set up an automation rule that would automatically assign tickets based on the country.  I found out after the employee left that the rule never actually worked.  I have gone through multiple forms trying to get a resolution but have had not luck.  This is a screenshot of the rule that is built out and the error message we get on each ticket:

This is team managed service project.  Any idea's would be greatly appreciated.

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Levi Stone 

Are you working with a Team Managed project or a Company Managed project? That information will display at the bottom of the navigation pane on the left when you are viewing the project.

I think the issue is that across your entire Jira system there is more than one field with the name "Country" and your automation is not clear which one it should be accessing.

In that case you have two choices

1. Use Advanced Editing with JSON to set the field, and find out the custom field ID associated with this specific field in this specific project.

2. Change the name of the field to be unique. For instance you could append the Project Key to the field name, or a number.

If you go with option 2 then you should be able to update the automation rule in each place where it references the "Country" field to reference the field by the new name.

Be advised that changing the name might break saved filters that use that field as part of their criteria.

[Levi Stone]

Hi @Trudy Claspill 

This is a team managed project.  We have another project that is also using the exact same automation and works just fine.  The only difference I can see between the two would be the one in question is a team managed service management project while the other working one is a service management project.  The other difference I see is that on the project where the automation works we have the option for fields in the project setting that I believe the former admin has set it to look for those country settings.  The non-working automation project does not have that item to choose from. 

In your personal opinion which option would you choose?  1 or 2?  Granted I don't know how to do either but just getting a feel for what you think is best.

[Trudy Claspill]

A little background:

There are two types of project back end architectures - Team Managed and Company Managed. 

Company Managed project architecture is designed to allow sharing of configuration elements - custom fields, workflows, screens, etc.

Team Managed project architecture is designed to isolate customization to a single project, not share customizations.

In the backend, each custom field definition gets a unique numeric ID. In Automation Rules it is possible to reference the field by the human readable name (Country) or by its ID (customfield_#####).

With regard to Company Managed projects, they use custom fields from a global collection of custom fields. If multiple Company Managed projects use a field named "Country", the chances are good that they are all referring to the same custom field definition.

For Team Managed projects, each project can define its own custom fields. If you create fields with identical names in different Team Managed projects, each of these fields will get a separate custom field definition and a separate unique ID. These will also be different from a custom field of the same name created for Company Managed projects.

Having said that, it has recently become possible for Team Managed project to also use some of the fields from the global collection.

So, before I advise you on what is the better solution I need to understand more about the current configuration.

You said

The only difference I can see between the two would be the one in question is a team managed service management project while the other working one is a service management project.

So both projects are Service Management projects, and the one having the problem is a Team Managed project. Is the other a Company Managed project?

I'm not sure what you mean by this:

The other difference I see is that on the project where the automation works we have the option for fields in the project setting that I believe the former admin has set it to look for those country settings.

Can you provide a screen image of what you are viewing when you are making that statement?

Also, are you using just one rule against multiple projects, or is there a separate copy of the rule for each project? On the Rule Details page for the rule what does it show in the Projects field?

[Levi Stone]

Hi @Trudy Claspill sorry for my confusion.  Here are the two screenshots your requested.  This screenshot is for the project that the automation is working: This screenshot is for the project that the automation isn't working: 

The automations are set per project from what I can tell.  Again I am coming in after the fact of these items being setup.  As you can tell with the first company managed project there is the "Fields" option and from there they have linked the company information but on the team managed I do not have that field so I don't know how to get it to recognize the country for the employees in our organization.

[Trudy Claspill]

Thank you for those clarifying screen images.

In a Team Managed project a Project Admin can manage the customizations. Go to Project Settings > Request Types.

There you will see each of the Request Types available in your project. 

Click on each one to see the fields associated with that Request Type.

From those screens you can add, remove, and modify the custom fields associated with the issues in the project.

Side note: here are a couple of references about custom fields in Team Managed Service Management projects.

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/available-custom-fields-for-team-managed-service-projects/

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/customize-request-fields-in-next-gen-service-projects/

From the above screen you can change the name of the Country field to make it unique for this project. Then update your automation rule and reselect the newly renamed Country field for editing. That should solve your issue.

[Levi Stone]

Hi @Trudy Claspill that did the trick!  Thank you so so much!

[Laurie Sciutti]

Hi @Levi Stone ~ does the Country field exist in Edit mode for that screen?  If so, can you manually select the values (United States / Israel)?  The error seems to point to the appropriate field not on the screen for that issue (or another Country field).  Make sure the Automation Rule is mapping to the appropriate "Country" field.  HTH 

[Levi Stone]

Hi @Laurie Sciutti thank you for the reply.  I may not understand fully so I apologize if I make this more confusing.  The request form has country listed in the Context field.

The form itself doesn't have have an option for the reporter to fill out the country we are wanting to leverage our already user data to change the country.