📢 Smart Values Help Panel is here for Jira Automation!

[#1]

Hey Community 👋 Sophia from Automation here.

Last month, Confluence Automation rolled out a brand new smart values help panel to make smart values more discoverable and easier to use. I’m excited to announce it’s now available in Jira products!

What are smart values and how do I use them?

Smart values are dynamic variables that can make your rule more flexible. They are constructed using a specific syntax called dot notation inside double mustache brackets. 

Smart values can be used to access and manipulate data within automation to add complexity or flexibility to your rules. For example:

• The smart value {{issue.reporter.displayName}} prints the display name of the issue’s reporter.

• The smart value {{deployment.state}} prints the state of the deployment.

• The smart value {{issue.summary}} prints the summary of an issue.

What is the new help panel?

Up until now, if you wanted to use smart values, you likely had to search through our support documentation to identify available smart values and understand how to use them correctly. This made discovering and configuring smart values difficult.

From now, whenever you see the double brackets icon { } in a field, you can simply click on the button to get the smart values help panel which will allow you to search through smart values, broken down by type, and to quickly copy them for use.

Here are some examples of what it will look like:

Click the { } button to access the Smart Values Panel.

Categories are listed for easy browsing of smart values.

Familiarise yourself with the explanation and examples of the smart values. Quickly Copy and Paste Smart Values.

You can also search for smart values in the top search bar.

When will it be available?

This is already available to all Jira Cloud Premium and Enterprise customers!

We want to hear from you

As always, we would love to hear your feedback. Please feel free to schedule a chat with us or leave a comment on below.

[Mauricio Heberle]

This is really good.

[Tomislav Tobijas]

Been waiting for this since it came out for Confluence automation. Really cool update! 😄

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Sophia Do 

Thank you for this information.  Some quick questions about this feature:

• What is the display order of the smart values, such as within {{issue}}, as it does not appear to be alphabetic?
• Will all of the supported smart values be included later, as it seems only some of them are listed?  To find others which are apparently supported, please use this how-to article: https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/find-the-smart-value-for-a-field/
• Will the dynamically populated smart values be added?  For example, I believe {{issue.subtasks}} is available, but populated by additional calls to the REST API functions as rules execute.  Probably same thing for {{issue.issuelinks}} and {{issue.worklog}}
• Some of the smart values, such as {{issue.project}}, show the next level of attributes available, such as name, id, key, etc.  Others instead only refer to an example, such as {{issue.assignee}} then shows {{issue.assignee.displayName}} without the list of other attributes.  Why are these different?
• For every smart value I examined, they include a note and reference at the bottom of the description for "Want to format these smart values differently?" which points to the Jira Data Center documentation, even though I am trying this from a Jira Cloud, free license site.  Should these links point to Jira Cloud, automation documentation instead as the supported features are different for the different products?
• Will the smart values for Jira Product Discovery (JPD) be added?

Kind regards,
Bill

[Sophia Do]

Hey @Bill Sheboy 

Thank you for the questions and feedback! 

• There currently isn't any sorting; it will be sorted alphabetically in the coming weeks. 
• We are planning to list all supported smart values eventually (including custom fields).
• We are looking into dynamically populated fields and if we can support this in the panel. 
• This is a current tech limitation - we're aiming to tackle this soon to ensure consistency throughout the panel. 
• We are currently working on documentation for Cloud. In the meantime, we have linked to Jira Data Center as it's the most relevant document. 
• We're definitely considering adding this feature to JPD - unfortunately I don't have a timeframe for you. 

Hopefully that has helped but if there's any other questions, feel free to comment or book in some time here so we can chat through all things smart values 😃

Cheers,

Sophia

[Bill Sheboy]

Thanks for your responses, @Sophia Do 

Regarding my last question: I understand improvements for JPD automation are continuing.  Instead I was asking if the JPD fields will be added for this help panel from the global admin, rule editor.  That is the location where multiple-project scoped rules would be defined to span JPD and their linked issues in software projects.  Thanks!