Set approver based on group or custom field selection?

[Shannon]

I would like our customers to be able to select a department name from a list of values on the request form (IT, HR, Fianance, etc) and have that selection auto populate an Approver using automation.

Standard functionality have asking the user to select the approver from a list of all customers is messy (15k users) and does not allow for accountability since any user, including themselves can be selected as the approver. 

Has anyone done this (is it possible?) or have another recommended approach to get the same outcome?

[Davin Studer · Accepted solution]

You should be able to set up an Automation rule for this fairly easily with the new automation in Jira Administration -> System -> Automation rules. You would just remove the approver field from the creation screen and then set up the rule.

[Jack Brickey]

i have been meaning to try this out as pre-automation the approvers list is so cumbersome. I have uninterested parties getting notified that an issue requires approval. Thanks for reminding me to give this a go @Davin Studer 

Hopefully @Shannon you will test it out before I get to it. ;-)

[Shannon]

@Jack Brickey Yes this automation step worked perfectly. It's going to be a messy list of if/then statements in our case because we have 15 different groups with unique approvers, but it works. 

For some reason I thought we couldn't set automation rules based on custom fields but looks like I was wrong - thank goodness! 

[Reid Bourgeois]

Regarding accountability, you can use automation to auto-close a ticket if a user sets them self as the approver.