How do I connect custom fields between multiple boards?

[Ben Golder]

Some background:

I am building out multiple boards again for a few different teams (one per team).

During the workflow for Team 1, an issue will be created. I want to have an automation which, when the issue is created, also creates a corresponding issue on Team 2's board to let them know to start working on their part of the assignment.

How I'm trying to map things now (which worked in the past but now gives me a vague warning that it can't be done) is where "Custom Field A" on issues from Board 1 get copied over into a matching "Custom Field A" in Team 2's board.

Question: Was there some kind of update which now forces this to be extra work to line up? Am I missing a step here? How can I get this to xfer over correctly?

The automation:

The issue type layout for Team 2

The issue type layout for Team 1

Here's the outcome/audit trail results as well

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi Ben,

Thanks for all the screenshots and the description here.  I can see what you are trying to do here.  I understand that you are trying to use automation in Jira Cloud in order to create a new issue in another project and in the process copy/sync a custom field value from the source issue into this destination issue.

If either one of these issues is in a next-gen project (and the screenshots certainly make it look like these are) that will be the problem here.  Next-gen projects do custom fields in a considerably different way than the classic Jira projects do.  More details in Customize an issue's fields in next-gen projects and from that page:

Fields in next-gen projects are contained within the project itself. Currently, you can't share a field created in one next-gen project with another next-gen project, or with a classic project. Similarly, you can't use a custom field created in a classic project on your next-gen project issues.

The only way I would expect this to work is if both projects are classic projects. If either or both projects are next-gen projects, then I don't know of a clear way to make this work the way you want in those project types.  Certainly if both projects classic type, then when a custom field is created, it can be a global custom field (or the custom field can be setup to have the same context for both projects).  This way both projects can see what values are valid for that custom field and then it becomes possible.

There are steps for migrating between next-gen and classic projects that might be helpful if you want to move the Jira issue data. 

I hope this helps, please let me know if you have any concerns about this.

Andy

[Ben Golder]

Dang, was really hoping that wasn't the case.

I have to use the NG boards or else I can't manage all the boards effectively in real time.


Can I use smart values for custom fields and have that port the corresponding info over properly?
It used to do that up until maybe a month ago and then stopped (I used to use smart values in the summary for auto created issues to port some of the info over). @Andy Heinzer 

Alternatively, is there any way at all I can get custom field information over into an issue on another board?

All I'm using is short text fields and number fields for this. Date would also be ideal but an assumed luxury at this point.

[Andy Heinzer]

Ok, so I had to play with this a bit to get it working, but yes, it is possible to get these values over to another issue using automation's smart values.  The problem here is that because these are project rules, the list of available fields is limited to fields in that original project.  So we can't directly select the destination field here.

However we can use the advanced fields to do this, we just need to make sure that we get the json payload correct when doing this.  In my own example, Project #1 has a custom field of text type called "ShortText1" while the destination project has a different custom field with the name of "shortertext".  In this example

{
"fields": { 
"shortertext": "{{issue.ShortText1}}"
}
}

When using this more options section of the automation action, there are additional fields that can be defined this way.

Try this, I got it working in my own Cloud site using automation. Both projects are next-gen in my testing.  Let me know if you run into any problems with this.

Andy

[Ben Golder]

This is awesome and looks pretty familiar to how I've been plugging smart values in for things like the automated emailers that generate from the same board.

I'm really excited to try this out once the project automations page finally starts to load again lol.

I'll try this out as soon as I can and report back.

[Ben Golder]

Just following up:

Applying Smartvalues is hit or miss (sometimes I need to add ".value" and sometimes I don't and I have no idea what rhyme or reason exists here)

However, I haven't yet had time do to try out editing the JSON on anything.