How do you notify the Assignee when an issue transitions without setting a certain field?

[Tom Horton]

I want to create an Automation that will warn the user that a custom field is not set when transitioning an issue in a workflow.

Use case: We need the DB Name field filled out before a developer moves an Issue to In Progress. When the developer tries to start working on the issue, I want to warn them that the DB Name field is empty.

I started making the automation but didn't see an option to directly notify the current user with a notification popup window. Is that possible, or do I have to send the notification indirectly thru email, slack, etc?

Thanks for any pointers.

Tom

[Fernando Eugênio da Silva · Accepted solution]

@Tom Horton 

Wouldn't it be better if you put a Validator in the workflow indicating that the 'DB Name' field is mandatory for when the issue goes to In progress?

Thus, the user who is making the transition will receive an error message and will not be able to send it to In Progress without filling in the field.

I think that would be the best idea here.

Using a jira automation would only notify the user after the issue has gone to In progress, but if you want to do that, you can use Action: Comment Issue to add a comment and notify the Assignee using the following smartvalue:
[~accountid:{{issue.assignee}}]

This will tag the Assignee user in a comment.

Regards,

Fernando

[Tom Horton]

Thanks Fernando! I forgot about editing the workflow. We ended up making a very basic default workflow when we started using Jira Software a few years ago and I forgot that you can validate the transitions.

🤦🏻

Tom

[Tom Horton]

@Fernando Eugênio da Silva what's the difference between conditions and validators in a workflow? I don't want to stop the transition, just present a warning in this case.

Tom

[Fernando Eugênio da Silva]

@Tom Horton 

The Validator will work as an action during the transition, while the Condition will work as an action before the transition.

For example:

If you use the Validator, the user will still see the transition to In Progress status, but if the field is not filled in when they try to transition, Jira will display an error message.

If you use Condition, the user will not even see the transition to the In Progress status if the field is not filled in. This way, the user will not know what information is missing to be filled in to proceed with the issue transition.

To avoid confusion, I would recommend using the Validator, because with it you can customize the error message, instructing the user to fill in the field.

If you really don't want to apply any of that, you can create a field of type 'Message Field (only view)'

Configure the default value indicating the completion of the field and display this field in your issues.

You won't need to apply Conditions or Validators if you don't want to close the transition, the 'Warning' will be there for you to read

[Tom Horton]

Thanks for the options! I'll see what will work better in practice.