Automation to subtract two fields not working

[Daryl Marsh]

Hello, I'm in the process of trying to create an automation that will give us visibility into how far off our teams estimates are from the actual time spent during development. Everything is working as expected, except the last step - isnt that always the case.

I have a custom field (customfield_10795) that is a text field that has the value of how many days the issue was in development. I want to take that value and subtract it from 'Story Points' and write that value to another custom text field.

Here is the smart value I'm using - {{issue.Story Points.minus(issue.customfield_10795)}}

Audit log says this was successful but never wrote to the custom text field.

The value that is currently returned is just the Story Points.

I've tried just about everything including swapping out minus for diff and using a 'number' field instead of a text field.

[Richard Cho - ServiceRocket]

@Daryl Marsh Try converting the text field to a number first using `asNumber` and see if that helps.

{{issue.Story Points.minus(issue.customfield_10795.asNumber)}}

[Richard Cho - ServiceRocket]

Also, I don't think you need that branch rule. Could probably simplify it to just this:

[Daryl Marsh]

adding 'asNumber' didn't change anything

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Daryl Marsh 

As a debugging technique, with you FOR branch can you add a Log action to print out the two smart values you are trying to use:

{{issue.Story Points}}

{{issue.customfield_10795}}

This is to get confirmation that the fields contain the values that you expect. Please then share with us an image of the updated rule and the output in the audit log.

[Daryl Marsh]

those numbers returned with the expected values - 

[Trudy Claspill]

Your custom field returned text, not a number.

You can't use text in a math operation. 

It needs to contain only a number, or parse the field to get just the numeric content.

Since you have defined it as a text field, what other text might you place in that field? Do you expect it to always be "# days"? Could there be some other unit of measure, like hours or weeks?

[Daryl Marsh]

It would always be days.

[Trudy Claspill]

Will it always be in the format?

# <space> days

Just curious, if the field is always going to contain a number of days why was it not created as a Number type custom field?

[Daryl Marsh]

I'm not married to the text field. I will re-create it as a number type and report back.