Jira Smart Automations - Comments

[Paul Fox-Reeks]

I've tried to find others that have this issue, but I've had no luck. I have an automation that will email and slack out certain tasks to stakeholders when the status of a task changes. It includes the status, and the comments. But the comments aren't pressed nicely, and I want to try and format it better. I want to replace the following entries in comments:

• * - <ul><il> tags
• !xxx! - images removed completely
• [smart-link] with <a> tags
• [accountId] just remove as it doesn't make sense.

Below are a couple of the example comments that get sent out, that I'm trying to format better.

The HTML block I have at the moment, just uses the {{comment.body}} smart value

---

 {{#issue.comments.reverse}}
<div style="background-color: #f9f9f9; padding: 10px; border-radius: 4px; margin-top: 10px; display: flex; align-items: center;">
<img src="{{author.avatarUrls.32x32}}" alt="Avatar" style="padding: 10px; max-width: 32px; max-height: 32px; vertical-align: middle; margin-right: 10px;">
<div>
<p><strong>Comment by:</strong> {{author.displayName}} at: {{created.convertToTimeZone("America/Denver").format("EEE, MMM d h:mm a")}}</p>
<p>{{body}}</p>
</div>
</div>
<br>
{{/issue.comments.reverse}}

[Paul Fox-Reeks · Accepted solution]

I actually found out how to correctly do this, however took some time going down the depths of documentation to find it: https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/convert-wiki-markup-to-html-or-plain-text-in-jira-automation/

I updated the code to:

{{#issue.comments.reverse}}
<div style="background-color: #f9f9f9; padding: 10px; border-radius: 4px; margin-top: 10px; display: flex; align-items: center;">
    <img src="{{author.avatarUrls.32x32}}" alt="Avatar" style="padding: 10px; max-width: 32px; max-height: 32px; vertical-align: middle; margin-right: 10px;" />
    <div>
      <p><strong>Comment by:</strong> {{author.displayName}} at: {{created.convertToTimeZone("America/Denver").format("EEE, MMM d h:mm a")}}</p>
      {{body.html}}
    </div>
</div>
<br />
{{/issue.comments.reverse}}

Which produced:

 

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Paul Fox-Reeks 

Well done, solving your own question!  :^)

To save you some time...you may notice the user mentions in your comments show in the Slack messages as Jira account id values, and not with the users' display names.  There is no easy way to change those, since the GDPR changes went into effect.

Theoretically...one could add a bunch of replaceAll() function calls, chained together after the body smart value, one for each possible user in your Jira instance.  That obviously would not be easily maintained in a rule, and so I would not recommend it.

If it looks too "unsightly" for readers in Slack, those could all be replaced to the same template text with a single replaceAll() with a regular expression.

Kind regards,
Bill