How can I populate my custom fields using substringBetween?

[Garrison Thomson]

I created two custom fields (Category and Practice) that I need to be populated with values from an email request (from the Description field). Everything I've read elsewhere suggests that using the substringBetween function will do this but I can't get it to work for some reason.

Automation rules:

• Trigger: manual (for testing, then I'll change it to when Issue Created)
• Action: Edit Issue
  • Choose fields to set
    • Category: {{issue.description.substringBetween(“:”,”.”)}}
    • Practice:{{issue.description.substringBetween(“-”,”’”)}}

My test Email request/Description contains:

Category:Data Question.
Practice-OSLC Practice'

I manually triggered the automation on my request but the custom fields Category and Practice do not populate. Is it obvious what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks for any help!

[Callum Carlile _Automation Consultants_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Garrison Thomson , welcome to the community!

This looks like it should work - I've given it a go myself and have been able to successfully set the fields using the smart value:

I copied and pasted both mine and your smart values into notepad to see if there were any small differences, and I did notice one:

For some reason, your speech marks and apostrophes are slightly slanted (no idea if this is just a strange formatting issue between devices/keyboards/languages) but this may be what's causing the problem - I tried copying and pasting yours into my automation rule and it did not work.

Just as a test - try copying and pasting this exact text and see if it works for you

{{issue.description.substringBetween(":",".")}}

{{issue.description.substringBetween("-","'")}}

I'm intruiged to see how you get on with this, hope this helps!

[Garrison Thomson]

Thank you so much for looking into this for me Callum. I tried copying/pasting the exact text from above but the fields still did not populate when I ran the rule.

I removed the smart values and tried just using text and that worked fine, so maybe there's something up with my custom fields that is preventing the smart values from working.

My two custom fields are a drop-down list and a short-text field. Maybe these types of fields aren't compatible with smart values? I'll be looking into this possibility further.

Thanks again!

[Garrison Thomson]

Callum, when you created your custom fields, did you create them as the "Short text (plain text only)" fields, or something else?

Thanks in advance.

[Garrison Thomson]

I got this to work. The issue was related to your original response Callum. I had to copy your smart values into notepad and then copy from there into my automation rule.

When I compared my original smart values with yours in notepad I saw something similar to what you saw:

Seems kinda weird, right?

Anyway, thanks so much for the help!

[Callum Carlile _Automation Consultants_]

@Garrison Thomson I'm glad you've got it sorted!

Yeah it's quite strange behaviour, I'm not too sure why that would be happening. Could there be some kind of difference between your computer language and the language set on your Jira instance? Or are you using some kind of non-standard keyboard?