Automation: Is there a way to request agents to manually enter information for an empty field?

[Stephanie Piper-Shimizu]

So I have a lovely automation to allow Service Desk agents to clone an issue over to the Engineering Software project board.  Tickets on the Engineering board require certain fields to be filled in.  Therefore, if the field is left blank from the Service Desk ticket, the automation will fail, and the ticket won't be created.

I can validate if the field is empty or not with the automation logic, but is there any way to alert the agent that the field needs to be filled in?  Like trigger an alert pop-up, or opening the field for them to submit to complete the automation?

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Stephanie Piper-Shimizu 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Automations are designed to run without interaction from the user. The only exception is an Automation that uses a Manual trigger. With the Manual trigger you can present a minimalistic screen to solicit input from the user, but this will be presented immediately and is not dynamically configured. You can check the issue for missing information and then present dynamic prompts.

In your rule you could have an email sent to the rule initiator to tell them that the clone process could not be completed because of data missing in fields X, Y, and Z. But there is no way to dynamically present prompts or a message to the user.

You could create a custom workflow transition for cloning the issue. In the workflow transition you could use rules/validators to ensure that the required fields are filled in. You could then change the trigger of your rule to the Issue Transitioned trigger and detect that specific transition has occurred.

[Stephanie Piper-Shimizu]

Thanks, that's helpful.

I ended up creating a logic branch to add an internal comment and flag the agent when the field is empty. to inform them the automation won't run until those fields are set.

[John Funk]

Hi Stephanie - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I would create a rule with a Manual trigger and add an easy input for the field that needs to be populated. The rule would be kicked off by the Agent to run the rule, this would cause a popup for the Agent to populate the field, and then the rule would clone the ticket and populate the required field with the input field from the popup.