Reminder Automation send Slack message

[Vanessa]

Hello there,

I would like to setup a reminder automation that sends a Slack message to a person when a certain date is reached.

I have looked in a few similar articles but their solutions did not work out for me.

Maybe you can point me in the right direction.

So far I have:

• A custom field named 'Remind me' which is a date picker field.
• The 'scheduled' part.
• The 'Send a Slack message' with the Webhook

What I would need:

1. The Automation should run every morning (for testing it is every 5 minutes so that I do not have to wait until the next day to see if it works).

2. I have no idea what to write in the JQL, I took this out of another article in the community but it doesn't work.

3. It would need to send a Slack message which contains the certain Issue that the reminder is set too. Here I would also need help with the JQL

Thank you so much already!

All the best,

Vanessa

[Daniel Eads]

Hi @Vanessa ,

This is quite close! There are just a couple changes to make this rule work as you intend.

1. In your scheduled trigger, you can remove the JQL filter. We will do a JQL search in a new action.
2. Add a Lookup issues action above the Send Slack message action. The JQL you have will go in this action:

   "Remind me" >= startofday() AND "Remind me" <= endofday()

That's all! Your newly modified rule will have that new action here:

The reason we'd use a "lookup issues" action rather than the JQL filter in the trigger is to populate a list of issues. You want to step through the list of issues in your Slack message, so we have to generate that list first. It's a slight difference from how it would work if we just searched those issues from the trigger - the end result is that you'll get one Slack message with a list of issues, rather than multiple Slack messages.

Cheers,
Daniel

[Vanessa]

Good evening Daniel,

it worked!!!
Thank you so much for the excellent, easy explanation.

Have a great start into the new week.

All the best,

Vanessa

[Vanessa]

@Daniel Eads hello,

I might have encountered one little problem, the message that is send to the person does not contain the issue URL.

Any idea how to change the automation?

Thanks in advance :) 

- Vanessa

[Daniel Eads]

If you just want to have it be a hyperlinked URL, that's a formatting change that can be done in the Slack message part. Here's the entire Slack message, still using the lookup function but tweaked so that the issues will be clickable in Slack:

Hey Antonia,

you wanted to be reminded for this following issue:
{{#lookupIssues}}
• <{{url}}|*{{key}}* {{summary}}>
{{/}}

Now for the part of the message being empty - that might be a couple things. Check:

1. Is the Lookup Issues action above the Slack message action on the list on the left? There won't be any data in the list for the Slack message if the lookup action hasn't run yet.
2. Are there issues that meet that criteria? Try running an issue search with the same JQL and see if there are any results.

As an improvement to this, you could also check to see if there are no items to be reminded that day, and just not send the Slack message if there aren't. Do that, you would add a Condition between the lookup and Slack actions - the Advanced Compare action.

This condition checks to see how many issues came back from the lookup - issues that have the "Remind me" field set to today. If there aren't any, then the condition fails and the Slack message won't be sent.

[Vanessa]

Hello Daniel!

Me again, I have done it as you mentioned.


Now I get an empty Slack message:

Any idea what might need to be changed? :) 

All the best,

Vanessa

[Hector Valenzuela]

Hi vanessa, 

did you check if your JQL is bringing any data first ? 

[Daniel Eads]

Very late in seeing this, but the smart values were not correct for the lookup list. I edited the answer above, but here is the relevant portion that needed to be updated in the Slack body:

{{#lookupIssues}}
• <{{url}}|*{{key}}* {{summary}}>
{{/}}