Merging Issues by Subject does not work in all cases

[Jan Christian Krause]

Hello JIRA-Community,

some months ago I asked how to merge incoming mails to only one issue by their subject (see https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/156770/merge-issues-by-e-mail-subject). I followed the tutorial suggested by Andy and configured a RegExp Field Processor. I set

"Search In Subject" = SUBJECT
"Select body part type to process" = PLAIN_TEXT
"Value Regexp" = (.*) (Consider the whole subject)
"Match Many Values" = Match one
"Custom Field Name" = Name of my custom field

This configuration worked for some of the incoming mails, but not for all of them. I analysed the mails this configuration does not work for. I did this by downloading them from the IMAP-folder as text files and comparing them with a comparison tool (Beyond Compare). The subjects are completely equal. Does anybody have an idea, why my does not work in all cases?

Greetings

Jan Christian

[Andy Brook [Plugin People] · Accepted solution]

Ah interesting. If you try to use the entire subject as a field 'value', you will run into problems for some emails. Querying issues (to locate matches) is done with JQL. Some characters cannot be used in fuzzy matching. This is why the example shows the use of a Regexp to match a unique ID (numeric is best, alphanumeric is fine, plain text, is ok if there are no special symbols).

Review the emails that didnt work, what symbols do they have?

Possibly the lookup could be escaped, but its a case that hasnt cropped up, mostly JEMH Regexp FP is used to integrated automated emails from 3rd party systems, that usually have a unique ID somewhere.

If this isn't the case you'll probably need to raise a support ticket, attach your Profile XML (option in the Profiles list) as well as exports of the 'initial' and 'follow up' emails that cause problems, so I can replicate and advise.

[Jan Christian Krause]

Hi Andy,

it seems that you are right. The mail subjects could contain "(",")" or ":". As documented at https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Performing+Text+Searches these characters have to be quoted. I raised the issue https://thepluginpeople.atlassian.net/browse/JEMH-1602 to report this as a bug.

Greetings,

Jan Christian