Use of group picker (single group) in jira automation

[Manju]

Hi,

Is there an option to use the group picker (single group) in a for each loop of a jira automation? Did anyone already try this out?

I would like to iterate through the jira users of a group in a for loop in an automation rule, but I don't seem to get access to the single users of this group. 

Can anybody help or has an idea?

[Manju]

Hi @Bill Sheboy  and @Frederik Vantroys ,

thank you for your quick response!

I quickly outline our usecase:
we set up a rule to create feedback issues for a number of Jira users in our company to receive certain information (like newly employed members to receive feedback regarding the onboarding, for example).

In the beginning, I used a smart value variable within my automation rule to list all the employee-email addresses, which were used in a foreach-loop to go through each user entry to create a feedback issue (and put this person as an assignee of the issue). We use a manual trigger, and the content for the feedback issue comes from the issue the automation rule is started from, which has to be an epic issue. Summary- and description fields from the epic issue are getting copied to the newly created feedback issue.

Later on I moved the email list from the smartvalue to a custom user-picker field (in the epic issue), to avoid errors when we try to edit the smart value within the automation rule and accidentally mistype the email addresses. So we used a user picker-custom field (AssigneeList) to add all jira users, which then was used in our foreach loop to iterate through our target group.

The problem is, that we have feedback issues every now and then that concern the whole company, so we would be forced to add hundreds of Jira users to our AssigneeList field (user picker custom field). To avoid this hassle, I tried to use Jira groups instead since these once depict a collection of Jira users and are complete/up-to-date.

But when I tried to access the group picker custom field (single group), I only could access the name and non of the items contained in this group. I am surprised that Atlassian didn’t make this group-field available for the automation process.

Bill, is there any example of the REST-API approach. I can check and learn from?

best regards,

Manju

[Bill Sheboy]

Thanks for that information.  With your additional details I do not believe my suggestion will work for you...There is a limit of 100 issues/items for a branch to process, and so you would not be able to process all of the users found in the group with a rule.

[Manju]

oh ok, does this "100 issues limit" apply to branch processing in general (also for retrieving the user list from a user picker field) or only with the approach you suggested using the REST-Api? Is this limitation documented somewhere?

[Bill Sheboy]

The answer to that is a bit complicated...in general the limits are related to the processing SLAs.  It appears they have changed since I last looked so I suggest reviewing this information below, look at your rule structure, and then determine if there will be problems: https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/automation-service-limits/

In general, the limit now appears higher than the original 100 issues (or things like an advanced branch on users), and the amount of processing in the rule impacts processing time and limits.  I recommend doing the math to determine what you expect before starting.

[Manju]

Thanks  alot @Bill Sheboy, I will look into it!

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Manju 

What problem are you trying to solve by doing this?  Knowing that will help the community provide more focused suggestions.

Until we learn that...

There is no build-in branching on users...beyond the scope of their association to issues.  One possible work-around would be to get the users with the REST API and branch over them.  For example:

• trigger: some trigger
• action: web request to call the REST API to get the users for your group
• advanced branch: parse out the users from the web response
  • action: some action for the user

Kind regards,
Bill

[Jar Lady]

Where do you configure the advanced branch? I don't see it in jira automation rule

[Bill Sheboy]

Advanced Branching is one of the types when you select to add a branch to the rule for Jira Cloud. 

https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-automation-branches/#Advanced-branching

This is not available for Jira Server or Data Center versions of automation.  Here is the suggestion to add that feature: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JIRAAUTOSERVER-749

[Frederik Vantroys]

I think you will need Advanced Field Editing for that.

This might get you started : https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/advanced-field-editing-using-json/

No time to make a working example now but I'll try to come back to this :-)