Jira Cloud Automations - Manual Selection of Multiple Issues posting in a single Message

[Sven Reiser]

Dear Community,

Goal: I wanted to add an automation to post the manually selected issues (you now can select multiple issues by pressing CMD) from the board in a slack channel. So everyone would just select their issues, hit the automation button and one message with all the issues selected shows up in slack.

Problem: My problem is that a manual trigger is applied to every single issue that has been selected independently. So in my scenario I am posting 5 messages if I have 5 issues selected. What I really aspire to have is a single message. 

I am not even sure if this is possible but probably someone does have a workaround to achieve just that?

Thanks in advance! 

[Bill Sheboy · Accepted solution]

Hi @Sven Reiser 

Short answer: I do not believe what you describe is possible.

Longer answer:

First thing, what problem are you trying to solve with your automation rule?  Knowing that may help the community to offer suggestions.

The manual trigger is intended to process a single selected issue, and the behavior you note of multiple selection (from Slack) appears to raise the events which trigger for each one individually.  As those events process asynchronously and are not guaranteed to happen at once the automation engine could not gather them.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Sven Reiser]

@Bill Sheboy 

Thanks for your answer, yeah I assumed this will be the answer actually.

🎯 My Goal

My team is sharing their planned issues for the day in a Slack channel. Up until last week folks did this manually, but as you can imagine this took some time for everyone. Now my ultimate goal was that folks can simply select all the issues in the board they intend to do today with (CMD + Click) and then hit the Automation to send the message for the team. But since the automation sees every issue as an independent event and triggers the automation times the amount of issues selected its not really working. It would send an independent message for each issue selected. Still having a manual multi select counting as one event would be a perfect fit for my use case, but I found a ...

🛠 Workaround

Now what I did to solve it is quite simple, but not as good as the above described ultimate goal. I just added an automation with a manual trigger to then look up issues with this query:

assignee in ({{initiator.accountId}}) AND (project = CS AND statusCategory = "In Progress" AND Sprint in openSprints())

Then I am simply sending it as a personal slack message like this:

{ 
  "assignee": "{{initiator.emailAddress}}",
  "message": "{{#lookupIssues}}:type-{{issueType.name}}: :spe-{{story point estimate.round}}: :prio-{{priority.name}}: {{key}} - {{summary}}\n{{/}}"
}

To let people select their scope for today we added another column in our Board called "Next up". This way you can select what's planned to be done today and then hit the automation to get them all send over in the correct format. The only issue with this approach is that sometimes we have issues in progress that we actually don't focus on today, so you could simply not select them. But now since you get the message as a personal one, you can simply copy and remove the ones you don't want before sending it in the representative channel. So its working really good now even tho I still would prefer the other workflow described above.

This is how the result looks now:

I guess we can close this thread then, but thanks for your reply anyways 😘

[Bill Sheboy]

Well done on your work-around!

Using status (a column) as a staging area is a great work-around for this, as it aligns with how a team using Jira to visualize their work.

With this approach you could also use a scheduled rule (rather than manually triggered one).  Then the rule could run one-time and process all "in progress" and "to do for today" issues in a batch if you needed to send everyone's items to one Slack channel.

[Sven Reiser]

@Bill Sheboy thanks a lot 😊 I also really like to finally have something working in place 🎉

I thought about a scheduled rule too but since we have people from different time zones and also some folks starting at 5:00 am and others at 10:00 am I think it will cause more damage than it helps. I think to manually trigger it after you really looked through the board and "selected" your scope for today is the very best option we have. I want to make sure that people also can re-trigger it if something has been missing or any other issue appeared. And if we are honest, to trigger the automation is like 10 seconds, so it's not really saving time.

[Bill Sheboy]

Yes, and...Sometimes it is not about the time savings; it is about pausing to think.  :^)

When people set up the conditions and run the rule, they get the Slack message and think: "Whoa...did I think I can finish all of that!?!  Let me update that to be realistic..."  If it helps the team, great!  If not, what could we try instead?

[Simmo]

Hey @Sven Reiser and @Bill Sheboy

Looks like you guys have dug into this in great depth. Bill is indeed correct that what is being requested isn't possible yet. We were discussing this scenario when implementing the board work but that was out of scope. It is definitely something we were/are thinking about.

Cheers,

Simmo

[Sven Reiser]

@Simmo 

I would really love if you implement this feature ❤️

[Simmo]

@Sven Reiser good to know! I wouldn't hold my breathe waiting for that though I'm afraid. But will def keep in mind!