Automation: Create Issue -> Pick correct assignee from Confluence list

[Christoph Keßler]

Dear All,

I created an Automation task, which creates every day an Issue.

This is for daily routine tasks.

We have a weekly rotation, which colleague has to work on these tasks.

The operation plan is on a Confluence page as a table   (Day |  Employee).

Is it possible that I add a step to the Automation process, which reads out the Confluence Table and searches for the Employee of the current day? And that this person is used in the Assignee field of the created Issue?

Thanks a Lot,

Chris

[Christoph Keßler · Accepted solution]

@John Funk @Bill Sheboy  @Dick Thank you for your help.

I was able to solve my requirements with the Lookup Table.

Here what I did:

As mentioned, we have a weekly rotation in the shift plan. So every calendar week someone else.

1. Created a task to "Create Lookup Table" with name "ShiftSchedule" with this format
    Calendar week number  |   user's mail address
    
    example
    39 | max@test.com
    40 | joe@test.com

2. Used the following SmartValue in the "Assignee" field of the "Create Incident" Task:
    {{ShiftSchedule.get(now.weekOfYear)}}

Result:   When the Automation starts, it creates the incident and choses the correct employee from the lookup table

So again, thanks for the help.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Christoph Keßler -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Theoretically...an automation rule could call the Confluence REST API with the Send Web Request action to get the page content, and then parse the HTML in the table to get the value.

An example call could be this one:

your Jira URL/wiki/rest/api/content/your Confluence page ID?expand=body.storage

I suspect that would be difficult to implement the parsing initially, but should work solidly after that point.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Dick]

Hi @Christoph Keßler, 

Maintaining the list of people is necessary either way. So why not maintain it in the Automation within Jira? 

You can make it really easy in Automation for the not-so-apt persons by choosing to define a couple of variables that hold the assignees, then uses the variables in the remainder of your automation script to provide the rotation over the variables (read people) you want. 

An example on how the variables could help: 

MondayFirstResponder = John

MondaySecondResponder = Kate

TuesdayFirstResponder = John

TuesdaySecondResponder = William

etc.

Then use the variables to scheme the rotation

• trigger the automation using a cron expression as a schedule
• determine the day it runs
• pick the first and second responder using if-blocks
• Create the ticket with the correct responder assigned 

and presto!

I hope this helps,

Dick

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[John Funk]

Hi Christoph - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I don't know of any way that Jira can pull data from Confluence like that. Maybe with Confluence databases??

The other idea would be to duplicate the table in lookup table in the Jira Automation rule. But you would need to manually maintain that and update it when the Confluence page gets updated.