Issue filed steps - email edition

Life is dynamic, so are we!

What are issue fields

If you already know the answer, skip this part!

As the name suggests these are fields inside each issue on Jira, to name a few,

• The description field

• The assignee field

• The reported field

All of these are standard issue fields in Jira, you can also have “Custom” fields. Custom fields can be placed upon your need, there is are many custom fields available on Jira but you will need to know only a few to take advantage of Approval Path’s dynamic features!

If you are not sure how to setup custom fields or how to enabled these features, worry NOT! We got you covered with step by step guides freely available on our documentation page.

Issue fields and Approval Path?!

Approval Path for Jira, enables users to take advantage of issue fields by assigning approvers based on issue field values!

Let’s say you want to start an approval path where the assignee of the any issue is automatically assigned as an approver.

You could create an approval path definition with a single approver step for each user and name them, then start the appropriate one by manually checking the assignee field….

OR

You could create a single definition with an issue-field user and assign it to “assignee” field. That is the magic of dynamic approvals in short!

Issue field are also not limited users, currently we support three main categories of dynamic approvers:

• Single approver

• Group approvers

  • Multiple groups approvers

• External approvers (outside of your Jira instance)

  • Multiple external approvers

On this article we will be focusing on the last category, external approvers (email)!

Issue field - email

External approvers are users without access to your Jira instance, external approvers has been around for a while, but the dynamic approach changes everything!

How dynamic approvals change the game?

Remember the example from the beginning of this article, every time you need approval from an external user, you have to create a new definition or edit the old one…

This will no longer be the case, you can now add a custom text field on your Jira issues where you input the email address of your external approver. You can then define a path where this field is read, evaluated and made into an approval step!

Multiple external approvers

Similarly to internal approvers, you may need more than one external approver for your path, of course we thought of that and the answer is NOT multiple issue fields 🙂

You can create a list of your external approvers on a table, it should look something like this:

You can place this table inside the Jira description field, make sure your path definition is set to “Description” under Issue field - email and voilà! All users will now be treated as approvers!

Need more flexibility and further dynamic steps?

Here are some useful links!

• Read the Resolve function from Issue field - Email

• Parallel group

• Webhook step

• Jira Automation

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