Automation - Set a field to the difference between now and the start date

[Luke Twinney]

I am trying to use automation to improve our reporting by automatically setting a field to the total time spent on a ticket. I am trying to accomplish this by setting a field to be the difference between the start date and when the issue was resolved. I'm using seconds in my rule for the sake of testing.

The rule seems to be running successfully however the "Time to Resolved" field is still empty afterwards. Time to resolved is a Date Time Picker field.

I've attached screenshots showing the full rule. Any ideas why this isn't working? 

Thank you

[Ste Wright · Accepted solution]

Hi @Luke Twinney 

There's no screenshots in the question - could you attach these?

Ste

[Luke Twinney]

Hi Stephen,

Sorry about that, they're uploaded now.

Thanks,

Luke

[Ste Wright]

Hi @Luke Twinney 

This won't work with a Date Time Picker - it's expecting an actual date-based value - eg. DD/MM/YYYY hh:mm - rather than a numeric value.

You'll need to publish this value either...

• Into a number field, or...
• Into a short text field (it can be the read-only type)

Ste

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @Luke Twinney

welcome to the community!

I trust that you were able to resolve this using Jira Automation! Just as food for thought and for future reference: If you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, you'll have more options available. E.g., your use case would be easy to solve using the app that my team and I are working on: JXL for Jira.

JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view for your issues that allows viewing, inline-editing, sorting, and filtering by all your issue fields, much like you’d do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets. It also comes with a number of so-called smart columns that aren’t natively available, including the time to/since start date.

This is how it looks in action:

As you can see above, you can easily sort and filter by the time to/since start date, and also use it across JXL's advanced features, such as support for (configurable) issue hierarchies, issue grouping by any issue field(s), sum-ups, or conditional formatting.

This all just works - there's no scripting or automation whatsoever required.

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes