Power up (again) with Jira Automation [Atlassian University Live webinar]

[Ben Thoma]

As part of an ongoing series, Atlassian University offered this free webinar to strengthen your Atlassian product skills and learn directly from Atlassian experts.

In this webinar, we showed how Jira Automation can easily replace and extend complex workflow configurations—like how to tell James Bond when there's a new global threat (really, check it out!)

Together we:

• Explored typical use cases

• Configured three complex rules

• Learned best practices and troubleshooting tips

This webinar was intended for Jira Cloud Project Administrators and Jira Cloud Administrators.

Watch the recording on demand and use the comments below to ask more questions related to this topic.

[Taranjeet Singh]

Thanks for sharing this webinar opportunity again, @Ben Thoma !

[Bernhard Lerchl]

Thank you guys so much, it was a really great session!

[Daniel Triftshaeuser]

Thank you guys very much for this webinar, especially the question and answer session was very helpful

I better be seeing looping for automation next week :D

[Joanna Thurmann]

Here are th handy links for automation:

• Automation - Getting Started Guide

• Jira Automation Rule Playground (template library)

• Automate your Jira Cloud processes and workflows

• Automation triggers

• Automation conditions

• Automation actions

• What is a rule actor?

• Run rules as another user

• Import and export automation rules

• Transfer automation rules from one user to another

• Advanced automation rule options

• Work with related issues with rule branching

• Advanced field editing - JSON

• Find the smart value for a field

• Handle wiki markup and HTML

• Jira Automation Training (on-demand course, free until July 1st)

• 79 Questions and Answers about Jira Automation

[Ben Thoma]

I was asked in the webinar if I could post the questions and answers from the live portion of the webinar here. I'm going to give this a try. There were a lot of questions, so I'll do my best to represent them well below.

Fee free to expand on anything with your own clarification, answers, or follow up questions…

[Ben Thoma]

If there are multiple sub-tasks and each one gets closed, can that trigger the closing of the parent issue?

Answer:

Yes, that is possible. When an issue closes, you can branch on the ‘Parent’ issue. In the branch, you can check if the parent’s sub-tasks are all closed, and if so, close the parent issue

[Ben Thoma]

Regarding performance: is there any downside to having a rule trigger on creation for example even if 80% of tickets get filtered out by the first condition?
Sometimes it's not entirely possible to build another trigger for it, any recommendations?

Answer:

The performance aspect is fairly minimal, triggering on all issue creation won’t have too big an affect. However, if the rule is a global rule, all rule executions will count towards the execution limit for your instance, regardless if it does not perform an action due to conditions in the rule.

Another option would be to instead run a scheduled trigger, perhaps once a day, and check for issues created that day. You can then perform actions on those rules, and this would only count towards one rule execution

[Ben Thoma]

Are you planning on integrating loops? So we can e.g. loop through a list of (Insight oder Jira issue) results and edit some list entries that match an if i have a related requirement. I want to create a sub task for each item of a list (insight field). Right now, I have to create a 10-step rule that addresses array indexes one by one.

Answer:

Yes, this feature is indeed a big ask from our community. Currently, you can look up a list of issues using the “Lookup Issue” action. As for iterating through those issues, we are releasing the ability to filter and loop through that list next week.

The feature currently in the release pipelines allows users to loop through any smart value list, such as issues.

[Ben Thoma]

Is it a recent change that Project Admins can create rules? We looked at Automation before and it was only possible for Jira Admins to create rules.

Answer:

The ability for project admins to create rules has been around for a while. Project admins can only create rules within the project’s scope, whilst Jira Admins can create rules in the “global” scope. This means only jira admins can create rules which run across all projects.

[Ben Thoma]

Is there a way to trigger an automation rule by clicking any frontend functionality inside a Jira ticket. like a button or something ?

Answer:

Yes, there is a trigger called “manual trigger”. Rules with this trigger configured will appear on the right hand menu of an Issue view, under “Automation Rules”. There, the rule appears as a button, which when pressed, will run against the current issue.

Normally if you set a manual Trigger, you get in Cloud a manual Trigger Button, to fire the automation. It's under the automation "panel" on the right.

[Ben Thoma]

Is there any way to inform to create Confluence Page in a particular space via A4J?

Answers:

1. Automation for Jira currently only works against Jira and cannot perform actions against Confluence. However, we have been working on Automation for Confluence, and are looking to release Automation for Confluence in the near future.
2. You can create a Confluence Page using the "Send web request" action and the Confluence REST API.

Which one is right? Perhaps @Sam Harding or @Joanna Thurmann can clarify.

[Sam Harding]

My comment about not integrating with confluence is about doing first party integrations; there currently is no component or action dedicated to creating confluence pages using internal mechanisms (such as, for example, creating an issue). You indeed can use "Send web request" to work around this.

[Ben Thoma]

Is there a difference between standard and premium plan according to the usage of automation and legacy automation?

Answer:

Premium plan gives more rule executions per month than the standard plan (1,000 vs 500). Rule executions are a count of how many ‘global’ rules are executed per month.

But I’m able to use both automation and legacy automation in standard?

Yes, both are available in standard

[Ben Thoma]

Will there ever be support for nested smart values? {{issue.List.get({another smart value}})}} for example

Answer:

Nesting currently is supported, but the documentation on this, and the correct syntax, is minimal, as it is a bit of a more obscure edge case. In your above use case, you can use the “another smart value” without the brackets. For example {{now.isAfter(issue.created)}}

[Ben Thoma]

Would it be possible to use automation to update Jira user membership? Like onboarding and off-boarding users?

Answer:

No, unfortunately this is not possible via automation. Jira site management itself cannot be affected using Automation for Jira.

[Ben Thoma]

Are you guys planning to develop a skill builder course based on automation?

Answer:

That’s one of the Skillbuilder titles that is under consideration for us. However, right now you have access to the entire Jira Automation course for free (Available until July 1, 2021)

[Ben Thoma]

We have so many rules right now and it drives us to find out which ones we created recently. Is there a way to add a column date on the list page ?
 The label is not really working for us

Answer:

The label functionality is the only real way to manage/filter your rule list at the moment. There is no way to add the date of rule creation to the rule list. This is a good idea though, I will add this to our upcoming projects to work on for the team. Cheers!

[Ben Thoma]

When a rule doesn’t run, what is the best way to find out why it didn’t run? (The Audit Log doesn’t really give much info on why the rule didn’t run)

Answer:

There is no way to pull more information out of the audit log than what is already there unfortunately. We are currently looking to add the ability to drill down and get more information out of the audit log. In the mean time, the best way to find out what went wrong is to turn on debug level logging for the package "com.codebarrel".

You can do this by navigation to
https://your-instance/secure/admin/ViewLogging.jspa
Then clicking "Configure logging level for another package".

After you have done that, can you reproduce the issue, make note of the time and the issue key that you performed the action on. Then generate a support zip, and attach it to this issue along with the issue key and time.

Is that for both cloud and DC? On cloud that gives me a dead link

@Sam Harding ?

[Sam Harding]

On cloud, we already have these logs. These instructions are for DC/server, in order to provide the logs we would otherwise not have access to. Thanks for the clarification!

[Joanna Thurmann]

Also remember that you can use "Log Action" to add more information to the log, e.g. what issue is being processed, some value on that issue, etc.  See Automation actions

[Ben Thoma]

Do you know if accessing (getting or setting) a component lead will be possible soon? Right now I think it’s only possible to get through api

Answer:

This is not currently supported with automation for Jira, and we do not have any plans to implement this. You can raise this as a feature request though via our public issue tracker

[Ben Thoma]

Any plans to be able to add/edit/delete automation rules programmatically via new REST endpoints?

Answer:

We have plans to enable this, but it is not scheduled to be worked on in the immediate future

[Ben Thoma]

Are there any plans on having an Automation for Jira for Insight course?

Answer:

Insight automation will be covered in an upcoming Insight Essentials course.

[Ben Thoma]

Do you see any possibility to include the Move issue operation as an Automation option?

Answer:

Move issue operation is currently the “Transition Issue” component in Automation

I meant moving an existing issue to another project ;)

@Sam Harding ?

[Sam Harding]

Ah I see. No there is no way to move or change the project an issue is in. This is a limitation around what actions can be performed by the Jira API that is available to us. The work around is to clone the issue into another project. We are not currently working on providing the ability to move an issue inter-project.  

[Ben Thoma]

When you use crontab for the schedule what timezone is it based upon and is this different for DC and Cloud versions?

Answer:

The timezone is UTC. I am not sure about whether DC would have differing behaviour, I'm sorry.

[Ben Thoma]

i want to transition an issue from a waiting status back to the previous status it comes from by a manual trigger. i tried with customfield and smartvalue. Is there a ready rule to implement this easily ?

Answer:

Getting the previous status is the tricky bit here. I think your idea about customfield is a good idea, it is possible to add a rule which saves the last status to a custom field. The manual trigger would then transition back to the status in the custom field.

[Ben Thoma]

Is it possible that automation rules from a server instance get deleted when the instance is migrated to a cloud instance?

Answer:

Migrating from server to cloud should copy across your rules. You can also manually migrate by exporting and importing rules yourself (from the global admin management page)

[Ben Thoma]

I’ve a rule to pre-populate the description of an issue with a template ( Acceptance criteria, pre-requisites etc.) on its creation, but when I create a clone using this issue the new issue is created but the description field is just wiped out. How can I fix this?

I’m creating a clone manually

sometimes when trying to set fields on "Clone" action it does not work. I previously had to do it in a separate "Edit" step

the rule is only to create new issues, and the cloning part is manual, so without the rule the clone would just copy over all the fields from the cloned by issue, but i believe my automation rule is interfering with this manual cloning step somehow

This was answered live and can be viewed in the recording.