Can an automation action be triggered when an issue is "viewed", not edited?

[Steve Hooczko]

Can an automation action be triggered when an issue is "viewed", not edited?

I want to have a custom field be the sum of two other fields without any trigger conditions.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Steve Hooczko 

What is your concern about "without any trigger conditions"?

Have you instead considered using automation rules to update the custom field whenever the source fields change...and so those would be the triggers?  Then the custom field would only refresh when necessary.

Kind regards,
Bill

[John Funk]

Good call

[Steve Hooczko]

I also wanted this to take affect for issues (i.e. the 2 custom fields) that have already been updated.

[Bill Sheboy]

Thanks for clarifying!

I encountered a similar situation when we added a rule to calculate Age of WIP, and my work-around was to create a one-time rule to batch process the earlier issues (using a scheduled trigger).  It needed to run in "chunks" as there were more than 100 issues to process...which is the automation limit for a rule.

Once everything was caught up, I was able to disable/remove that rule.

[John Funk]

Hi Steve,

No, you can't trigger it when just viewed - nor do I think that you really want that. 

You can create a manual trigger that when you go to the issue, you can trigger it by clicking on the rule execution then. 

Is that what you are looking for?

[Steve Hooczko]

OK, you answered my main question re: not being able to trigger on viewing. The manual trigger is an option. Once the manual trigger is executed the summation field will contain the sum thereafter, correct?

[John Funk]

Correct 

[Deleted user]

Hi @John Funk 

are you aware if any of the scripting tools such as Scriptrunner can trigger an action when an issue is viewed ?

I want to be able to see which of my issues have changes/comments that i have not viewed yet without opening each one to look for changes. This would be similar to the way outlook highlights unread email messages.

Best regards -- Kevin

[John Funk]

Hey Kevin - no, I am not aware of any tools that can do that based on views. If it is that important, you might want to include a custom field called Viewed or something like that. And then quickly update that field with a value when you view it. Then you would be able to run some easy filters/queries. 

[Deleted user]

Hi @John Funk 

thanks for your response. 

When you say "quickly update", how would i do that ?

If this is a button for the user to click that writes the time of click into the database, I would consider this a manual workaround, not an automation. 

I thought it might be possible to monitor a custom field and trigger when this gets read by Jira as part of the viewing function. However, i dont think Atlassian allows access to DB at that level -- even less likely on cloud.

Best regards -- Kevin

[John Funk]

Yes, it would be manual. And like I mentioned above, there is not going to be a way to automate that right now in Cloud. And no, you won't have access to the DB in Jira Cloud. 

[Deleted user]

Hi @John Funk 

I understand it is possible to embed an image in an issue that will be rendered when the issue is viewed. The image can also be a link to a remote server.

In this case, does Jira access the remote link each time the issue is viewed, or does it cache the image ?

I'm thinking when jira accesses the image -- an event on the remote web server --  i could use this as a signal that the issue has been viewed. Of course i would need a different image (or URL) for each issue in order to know which issue has been viewed.  Do you think this could work ?

Best regards -- Kevin

[John Funk]

I don't know for sure, but I would imagine that it is caching the image.  You could give it a try and see though - sounds like an interesting experiment.  :-)

[Deleted user]

Hi @John Funk 

i tried a couple of methods

1. link in description -- this just allows you to click link to follow but does not download the image

2. attach image to description -- this uploads the image so it becomes local, remote connection is lost

I read that it is possible to put JS/HTML in issue fields, but it seems that wont work on cloud (see image). We are presently on server but moving to cloud because it is more  restrictive ;-)

So at the moment i have run out of ideas again.... :-(

Best regards -- Kevin

[John Funk]

Yeah, I really don't know of a way to do it. Seems to me there is a need for an app that can list issues seen by users in a particular time period. But I know of none that exist.