The Importance of Time Tracking for Big Teams
How do you maintain visibility, manage a high volume of communications and ensure everyone is able to make the best use of their time in a BIG team?
Combining checklists with automation and workflow behaviors opens up a world of possibilities for automating and streamlining processes. You can:
But what if you want to perform operations on / validate for a specific checklist item, rather than the checklist as a whole?
This is where Regex comes into the picture. Using Regex allows you to match for exact text, or a defined range in any string. You can use Regex to check for the specific text of a checklist item, or a checklist custom status. Â This article will provide examples of how you can use regular expressions with checklists in Jira.
Regex, also known as Regular Expressions or Regexp, is a set of characters that can be used to define a search pattern in text. These patterns can be used to find text in a string, to validate input, etc. For example, given a list of file names, you could use Regex to identify only those that have a “.pdf” extension. Or you could validate that a date or a phone number in a text field is formatted correctly.
Regex is a powerful tool. However, it is not easily readable or particularly intuitive. Therefore it’s good to have a few resources available when you’re learning Regex:
There are three places where you are likely to use Regex in Jira:
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You can use the replaceAll function with Regex to transition checklist items to a custom status. In this case, an automation rule accessed the Checklist Text custom field to change the status of all checklist items to “Deployed” when the issue was transitioned.
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You can use the Regex validator to check that a specific checklist item is complete. The examples below will work with both simple checkboxes and item statuses.
The example above will block the transition if the fourth item in the list is incomplete. To block transition if Nth item is incomplete, change the 3 in the expression above to N - 1.
Note that this expression cannot be used to validate for the first item in the list, and that the list must contain at least N items. If you want to validate for more than one position in the list, you will need to create separate validators for each position.
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The following regular expressions can be used to make the transition require at least one checked item, and optionally to require that checklist has at least one item. The expressions can work with or without statuses. If you use custom statuses, you will need to adjust the expressions.
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In this case, a team was using multiple checklists on development issues. They used a Definition of Ready checklist that was added to stories by default. Later they added an Acceptance Criteria list. A Regex validator blocked the issue from being transitioned to the QA status unless the Acceptance Criteria list was present and had at least three items:
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These expressions are useful if you have multiple checklists on a single issue.
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These are just a few examples of how you can use the powerful combination of Checklists and Regular Expressions in Jira. See the automation section of our documentation for more ideas.
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