Airtable automation actions: Jira Cloud

As part Airtable’s available Automations actions, Business and Enterprise Scale users can employ Jira Cloud automation actions. These automation actions allow you to either create or update an issue in Jira Cloud.

• As a prerequisite, you will need to have both an existing Jira Cloud account and a Jira Cloud instance.

• If your organization uses Jira Server (On-prem), then check out the documentation for those actions here.

• If you or your IT team need more information concerning OAuth scopes and the security relating to how we interact with Jira's API, then please check out the relevant section in this article.

Setting up Jira Cloud actions

1. Create a new automation - To start creating an automation, from the open base of your choice click on Automations in the upper left corner of your screen to open the automation configuration window. Click the + Create automation option to begin the setup process. If you would like, you can rename the automation right away to make it easier to understand what it does.

2. Configure a trigger - Next, you will need to click + Add trigger option. Once clicked, the available triggers will display for you to choose from. Learn more about all available automation triggers here. Once you have configured and tested the trigger, you can move on to the next step. For either of the Jira Cloud actions, you’ll need to set up the trigger that will tell the automation when to run and which record to use to either update or create a Jira issue.

   1. For this walkthrough’s example, we’ll be using a table we created to keep track of user-submitted bugs. Our ideal workflow is when a new record enters our “New Bugs” view it will automatically create a Jira issue with the same information.

   2. We will use the “When record enters a view” trigger to ensure that any record that enters this view will trigger our new Automation.

   3. Next, you’ll choose the Jira Cloud action that best suits your use case.

3. Add a Jira action - There are two Jira Cloud actions to choose from; “Create issue” or “Update issue.”

   1. (Option 1): Creating a new Jira Issue using the “Create issue” action

      • After your trigger is configured and tested, you can start configuring a Jira Cloud action.

      • You’ll be prompted to select or connect your Jira account.

      • Once your account is connected, the dropdown options for Site, Project, and Issue Type will be pre-populated based on your Jira account. Click the dropdown menus and select the appropriate option for your use case. For our example automation, we’ll use the “Bug” Issue type.

      After this initial account configuration is set, you can then customize the details for the new Jira issue you’ll be creating. The fields you can customize include:

      • Summary

      • Description

      • Labels

      • Reporter (contingent on your Jira account permissions)

      • Assignee (contingent on your Jira account permissions)

      • Status

      • Other Issue Data - The subfields listed under the “Other Issue Data” input will allow you to configure custom fields for the currently selected issue type.

      For our bug tracking example, we set up the below configuration for our new Jira issue.

      

      After configuring the action’s options, we’ll run a test to ensure everything is set up properly so far. You can see more information about the test, and your newly created Jira issue, by clicking on the arrow to the right of the test status.

      NOTE

      When the “Jira Cloud: Create issue” action is successfully run it will automatically return the newly created Jira Issue ID as well as the Jira Issue Key. Learn more about using the Issue ID in other automation steps in this section.

   2. (Option 2): Updating an existing Jira Issue using the “Update Issue” action

      • After your trigger is configured and tested, you can start configuring a Jira Cloud action.

      • You’ll be prompted to select or connect your Jira account.

      • Watch a 100-second walkthrough

      • In order to set up the “Jira Cloud Update Issue” action, you will need to have the Jira Issue IDs for the issues you are looking to update. You can either track these in an Airtable field manually or utilize the IDs captured in an earlier step of the automation as described below.

      Here is the trigger we’ll be for this new automation using our previous bug tracking example:

      

      You’ll want to ensure that any updates to the table are reflected in the Jira issue we just made. Once the trigger is set up, we can create our “Jira: Update Issue” action. The initial configuration steps are very similar to the steps we took when creating a new Jira issue. You’ll need to select the Jira Account, Site, and Project you’d like to update.

      

      • Choosing an “Issue Type” for updating an existing Jira Issue is optional, but will give you access to any type-specific fields.

      • You’ll then need to enter the Jira Issue ID or Key that you’d like to update. This is where we will utilize the Jira Issue ID field we previously created on our example table.

      • Next, you can go about picking the fields you’d like to update on the Jira issue from the prefilled list.

      

      NOTE

      If you choose a field to update but don’t fill it with a value, then that field will be cleared out in the related Jira Issue.

4. Test and enable the automation - The last step, as always, is to test your new automation to ensure everything is configured correctly before turning your new automation on. In our example of utilizing both Jira actions in an automation, turning on the automation and adding a new record to the table will now create a corresponding Jira issue and will update our record with the ID of that issue.

   

   As updates are made in Airtable to the individual Issue’s record, the automation will additionally update the Issue in Jira.

Capturing the ID of a created Jira issue

A reference to the Jira Issue ID is necessary for the “Jira Cloud: Update issue” action.

• If you plan to create an automation to update Jira issues at any point in the future we strongly recommend creating a separate field on your table to keep track of the Jira Issue ID for any newly created Jira issues.

• For our example, we know we want to save the newly created Jira issue ID so we will add one more action to this automation. The below action will update the record that initially kicked off this automation by capturing the returned ID for our new Jira issue in the “Jira Issue Id” field on the table.

  

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