What are triggers?

Triggers are what starts the execution of any rule (& subsequently actions). ARN supports following types of triggers at the moment.

Manual

Rules with this trigger can only be invoked manually. The simple use case that it addresses is when we want to generate release notes on an ad-hoc basis.

Open

Version created

Version id/name is the input parameter for this trigger. But this parameter is passed from the Jira version to create action to the ARN rule. Thus as soon as a new version is created in the given Jira project, rules that have this trigger will get executed. 

Open

Version released

Version id/name is the input parameter for this trigger. But this parameter is passed from Jira version release action to the ARN rule. Thus as soon as a version is released in Jira, rules that have this trigger will be executed. 

Scheduled before N days of release

If certain rules are needed to be executed before the planned release date on a recurring frequency, schedule them using this trigger. For a scheduled trigger, the system expects the number of days parameter from you. The idea is to send pre-release emails e.g. send pre-release notes 4 days before the planned release date or 10 days before the release date etc. Planned release date is picked up from Versions defined in your Jira project.

Additionally, you can also configure the timezone & time on which this trigger should run on the given day.

Scheduled at interval

It is possible to execute rules at regular intervals with the help of this trigger. Simply provide a cron expression & timezone as input. Do keep in mind that no version is passed to the actions within this rule when the rule is executed. Thus, for such a rule - ideally all of the actions should have templates where version input variable/s (i.e. versionId, versionName, versionDesc etc) are not used at all.

You can use this helper tool to customize the cron expression to meet your needs

Sprint started

To automate the execution of rules based on when Sprint started use Sprint started trigger and publish relevant release notes, documents, and reports for the sprints created in Jira project(s). When this trigger is selected, the rule is triggered whenever a sprint is marked as started in the project and relevant release notes will be published to end users based on given template and rule configuration.

Sprint completed

If the templates in your rule actions are based on Sprint input variables, it makes sense to automatically trigger that rule when a Sprint is completed. That’s what this trigger does.

Webhook

If certain rules are needed to be executed only after some processes in other applications are completed, use the webhook trigger. e.g. if you want a certain version's release notes to be triggered only after the build is deployed successfully on the test environment.

In this case, webhook endpoint refers/considers the variables provided in the selected template in rule action. You van use the GET or POST request type as needed.

Notice that the GET & POST action provides the list of version and sprint variables in the template.

Triggering webhook for Cloud version

For the cloud version of the app, it is very easy to trigger the webhook. You just have to copy the webhook URL and hit it with corresponding version variables. No authentication is needed. You can even do that directly via the browser just to verify it.

Triggering webhook for Server/DC version

For server/DC version of the app, you have to send a GET request to the webhook URL. Additionally with the GET request, provide an Authorization header with content Basicfollowed by the encoded string generated from https://www.base64encode.org/ for username:password

That is, authentication is needed to trigger the webhook in this case.