How to update a custom date field on existing issues to the Create date plus 3 business days?

[Katherine Lisman]

I created a custom field "SLA Date" and want to populate this field on existing issues based on another custom field's value ("Severity Level"). 

I'm attempting to do this using the following Automation Rule:

When: Scheduled

    Every 5 minutes

For Current Issue

    Severity Level equals

           S2

Then: Edit issue fields - SLA Date - {{issue.createdDate.plusBusinessDays(3)}}

I've also tried: 

{{issue.created.plusBusinessDays(3)}} and

{{now.diff(issue.created).plusBusinessDays(3)}}

However, when I publish the rule and choose to "Run Rule", the SLA Date field is not updated.

I want to calculate this date for an S2 to be the date the issue was created plus 3 business days.

I have researched a couple of help pages, but can't seem to figure this one out (page 1, page 2). 

Thank you in advance for your assistance!

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Katherine Lisman 

I suspect that your rule doesn't know which issue to act upon.

When you add the Branch condition and you select "For Current Issue" then the rul must have already selected an issue with a previous condition or trigger, from which it can identify the Related Issues upon which you want it to act in the branch.

Try using the JQL option for the Branch condition, and specifying a JQL to select 1..n specific issues to try your rule against.

[Katherine Lisman]

@Trudy Claspill , so I do have the JQL on the schedule step, and it shows 119 issues found. 

The audit appears to show that it was successful, now. However, the values are not showing up in my query when I add the "SLA Date" field as a column.

I have this field hidden on the bug issue screen, but I should be able to see the value in a filter. At least it works that way on my auto rule when creating an issue. On that rule, I don't use "Scheduled" I use the "When: Issue created" trigger. And that shows the value in the SLA Date value in the SLA Date column on the filter correctly, but on that one, I use {{now.plusBusinessDays(3)}} - not sure how this is different. 

[Trudy Claspill]

For debugging purposes can you use the Action "Log Action" to log the current value of the field and the new value(s) you are calculating?

On a side note, with regard to your attempt to use this

{{now.diff(issue.created).plusBusinessDays(3)}}

... there are a couple things wrong with that as per this document.

{{[date1].diff([date2]).[unit]}}


Returns the amount of time between date1 and date2, in the unit specified. If date2 is earlier than date1, the value returned will be negative. You can combine this with the smart value to return a positive value. 

It returns a quantity, not a date.

[Katherine Lisman]

@Trudy Claspill - ah!  Ok, thank you! I finally got it to work using:

{{issue.created.plusBusinessDays(3)}}

Thank you so much for your help! 

[Trudy Claspill]

In your first post you said you tried that and it didn't work.

Do you know what the root problem was?

[Katherine Lisman]

@Trudy Claspill , yes, I didn't give the backend enough time to catch up. It was a timing issue. 

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Katherine Lisman 

As an FYI for your rule with a scheduled trigger on JQL, automation rules can only process up to 100 issues per execution.  You noted that when you ran/tested the JQL it returned 119 issues.

Something to watch for in the future as such a rule could take a few executions to complete all the work, processing in chunks when your JQL supports it.  For example, only looking for issues where the SLA Date IS EMPTY.

Best regards,

Bill

[Katherine Lisman]

Thanks, @Bill Sheboy ! I had to modify my JQL to return less than 100 and it's working now.  Thank you!!

[Bill Sheboy]

Oops... My bad if I explained that poorly.  Second attempt:

The JQL for an automation rule is permitted to return more than 100 issues...and only the first 100 will be processed.  That means if your rule needs to process them all, structure the rule so that is possible to process them in chunks...usually with repeated runs of the rule.  (e.g. your scheduled trigger with JQL  :^)

One thing to make that chunk-processing more predictable is to add an ORDER BY clause to the JQL.  You can then see progress as the chunks are processed more easily.

[Katherine Lisman]

@Bill Sheboy - oh nice! I didn't know that...good advice. I'll try that. Thank you so much!