Automation to share direct links to KB articles with portal users

Summary

This article explains the process of copying the Confluence URL using an Automation rule and pasting it into the comment on the issue publicly so that portal customers can view the KB article. This process saves time for agents because they don't have to manually add a comment to the issue.

Here's how the comment will look on issue view:

On portal:

Diagnosis

As this is an automatic process, we'll use an automation rule to accomplish this requirement.

As there is no direct way to get the URL of the Confluence pages linked to an issue, we will use the Send web request action in an Automation rule to execute the Get remote issue links endpoint:

This API endpoint returns the remote issue links for an issue. When a remote issue link global ID is provided, the record with that global ID is returned. Otherwise all remote issue links are returned. Where a global ID includes reserved URL characters these must be escaped in the request.

Solution

Step 1:

Start by creating an Automation rule with a Manual trigger:

Select the Groups that can run trigger. If no value is selected, all logged-in users can trigger the rule manually. You can also select to Show manual trigger for a particular Issue type, Assignee or Issue status.

Step 2:

Add the Send web request action:

Enter the endpoint below:

Check the flag Delay execution of subsequent rule actions until we've received a response for this web request.

Encode the credentials "<EMAIL>:<API_TOKEN>" with base64. We can do this with any online tool like Base64 encode. Make sure not to include a line break at the end. Add the Headers with Authorization Basic "<EMAIL>:<API_TOKEN>" encoded to base64.

Step 3:

Add the action Comment on issue:

The smart value shown below will be rendered as the URL of the Confluence page:

If the need arises, uncheck the flag: Prevent duplicates by only adding this comment once to a particular issue.

Make sure to change the comment visibility to Share with customer.

If there are multiple pages linked, simply edit the rule to include all the links in the comment