How to prevent the Jira Automation user from using a transition (or force it to use a specific one)

[Sascha]

Hi,

I've got a workflow transition set up that when a user moves an issue to IN PROGRESS it will automatically put that user as the assignee.

I've also got an automation set up that when a user assigns himself to an issue from the current sprint, it automatically moves it to IN PROGRESS.

My problem is that when the automation kicks in, it's "the automation" that transitions the issue to IN PROGRESS and therefore the issue gets its assignee changed automatically to AJ (Automation for Jira).

I've limited the auto-assign transition to jira-users thinking that it would exclude the automation user (it doesn't). I've created a new transition without the reassignment  and restricted it to atlassian-addons-admin in the hope that it would get used first, but it doesn't.

So how can I prevent Jira Automation from using the transition with the auto-assignment, or conversely, force it to use the transition that doesn't include the auto-assignment?

[Lisa Forstberg · Accepted solution]

Hi sasha,

I would test adding a condition on the user visible transition (the one that auto-assigns) to prevent the AJ from taking that transition.

i would also hide the automation-transition for regular users to not confuse the IU for them.

br

Lisa

[Sascha]

The automation transition is already hidden (only available to atlassian-addon). As for adding a condition on the user visible transition, care to elaborate?

The only restriction that I can see work is to only allow the transition if the Assignee field is blank/unassigned, but I can't do that. Jira will only let me match a user, and Jira Automation doesn't appear in the list of users that I can select from.

[Sascha]

UPDATE

So I discovered that if I add the transition restriction of "Restrict when a field is a specific value", select Assignee as the field and leave the People option blank, then it checks for Assignee = Empty. 

This seems to have resolved my issue because when doing the transition to IN PROGRESS, the assignee is already set to someone's name and therefore not empty. I'll need to see if this setup causes any other weird issues but so far so good.