Introduction

While creating and testing your application links, you may notice that some applications accept 'Full Name' as the input for their user type fields (like Assignee, etc). Others accept 'e-mail' and still others accept a user ID. ConnectALL can handle this mapping for you. The ‘automatic user value mapping’ feature enables automatic synchronization of user-type fields. ConnectALL can match users across applications as long as there is a value in common, either the userid, the user's name, or the user's email address.

You can enable this feature while configuring or modifying an automation. Note that this feature is available only for the user-type fields such as ID, Name, email, Assignee, Assigned To, Detected By, Reporter, etc. 

This feature is available to the following applications:

  • Atlassian Jira On-Premise
  • Atlassian Jira Cloud under certain situations
  • Cherwell
  • Digital.ai Agility (Formerly VersionOne)
  • Micro Focus ALM Octane
  • Micro Focus ALM/Quality Center
  • Microsoft Project Server
  • Microsoft Project Server Online
  • Rally
  • ServiceNow

Enabling Automatic Mapping

To enable the automatic user value mapping feature in an automation, do the following steps:

  1. Create a new automation from the ConnectALL automation tab or modify an existing automation.
  2. Navigate to the Field Mapping tab.
  3. Under the Field Mapping tab, click the cog wheel icon against a value. This brings up the Field Configuration pop-up screen.


  4. Under the required application:
    1. Ensure that the Enable option is selected against the Enable User Search By option. This field will not appear if the Automatic Mapping feature is not available for that adapter.
    2. Click the drop-down menu under that and select a value. The option you choose (id/name/email) should always be an input/value accepted by that adapter.


  5. Click Save.

Note
  • If 'Automatic User Value Mapping' is enabled for one application and either not enabled or not available in the other, ensure that the value that you have chosen is available in the other application. If you enable this feature under both applications, ensure that you select the correct corresponding values.
  • If a user doesn't exist on the destination application, ConnectALL will send the user value received from the source application as it is to the destination application.
  • If you are mapping by email and more than one user in the destination application has that email id, the last value received from the source application will be sent to the destination application and used for mapping.
  • You can delete a user included in value mapping only if your application supports it. Some applications do not allow deletion due to GDPR compliance. Note that if you must delete a user, export the map file, delete the value (user) from the file, and reimport the file.
  • When you do a new import, it will overwrite all the current value mappings.

As ConnectALL syncs records it will learn and save value mappings. You can view these gleaned mappings in the Value Mapping screen. There is no difference between values gleaned during automatic user value mapping and values manually added via the value mapping screen.  Next, we discuss how ‘Automatic User Value Mapping’ is done in some common integrations.

Common Integrations

Jira Server and VSTS

Jira users are identified based on their ID, but can be looked up by email. VSTS users are identified based on their email address. To automatically map the user values: 

  • Choose ‘email’ under Jira. ConnectALL will look up Jira users by email if necessary and will store value mappings containing the Jira user's ID and email address as well as the VSTS user's email address.

ConnectALL will ensure that whenever a record is synced from Jira to VSTS, from the user-id received from Jira it will automatically detect the corresponding user's email and do the value mapping. This email will be sent in the payload to VSTS during record create/update.

In the same way, when a record is picked from VSTS to be synced to Jira, based on the email received from VSTS, ConnectALL will automatically detect the corresponding Jira user ID and do the value mapping. This ID will be sent in the payload to JIRA during record create/update.

Cloud Jira behaves a little differently because of GDPR. ConnectALL can find Jira users by their email address, so synchronizations from VSTS to Jira will always work. And once those users are learned, synchronizations from Jira to VSTS will work. However, if the first time ConnectALL sees a given user is when syncing from Jira Cloud to VSTS, ConnectALL will be unable to determine the user's email address (and unable to match to a VSTS user) unless that specific user has set their email to be public in their Jira Cloud profile. 

VSTS and ServiceNow

VSTS users are identified based on their email address. ServiceNow users are identified based on their internal sys_id but can be looked up by email. To automatically map the user values:

  • Choose ‘email’ under ServiceNow. When you do so, the ID field values and the email address values are gleaned and are automatically stored as value mappings.

Jira on-prem and ALM

Jira Server/on-premise and ALM users are both identified based on their userid.

  • Choose the ID option, either under JIRA or ALM. ConnectALL will match users by userid.

Cloud Jira and Octane

Cloud Jira and Octane users can be identified based on 'ID' or ‘email’.

  • Choose either ID or email under Cloud Jira and Octane.

However, users must enable profile visibility for this to work using email. The user search result from Jira cloud (whether by account id or by email) will not include the user's email unless that is enabled in that user's profile visibility settings. 

On-premise Jira and Octane

Octane users are identified by 'Name' and Jira users are identified by 'ID'.

  • Choose the 'ID' option under Octane.
  • Choose the 'Name' option under Jira.

Rally and Octane

Rally and Octane users are both identified based on ‘name’.

  • Choose the Name option under Rally and Octane.

When you do so, both the Name fields are automatically mapped.

Octane and ALM

ALM users are identified by 'ID' and Octane users are identified by 'Name'.

  • Choose the 'Name' option under ALM.
  • Choose the 'ID' option under Octane.

Note that in order to use Automatic User Value Mapping with Octane, the following information must be set for relevant users in Octane and ConnectALL:

  • Octane: User's role must be Workspace Admin or Space Admin
  • ConnectALL: User is configured as a Sync User

For any other roles in Octane, this synchronization will fail.

Microsoft Project Online/Server and ServiceNow

Microsoft Project Online/Server and ServiceNow users are both identified based on ‘name’.

  • Choose the 'name' option under Microsoft Project Online/Server and ServiceNow.
Points to Remember
  • The automatic user value mapping option is displayed for all types of fields and it is not restricted to user type fields. So, ensure that you enable this option only for appropriate fields, where user values will be retrieved as the input. 
  • The data you use for mapping a field must be the same in both applications. For example, if you have selected 'email' under both the applications, the email address of the user needs to be the same in both applications. 
  • You can synchronize two applications where automatic value mapping is supported. Ensure that the correct search option is selected and saved.

  • It is entirely up to you to decide whether to enable the search option in both the applications or in any one of them. Enabling it in one application will ensure that automatic user value mapping will be supported on both the applications—if the data input required for the other application is available in the source application (id/name/email).

Synchronizing Tagged Users

If you are using Jira, the Automatic User Value Mapping functionality could also be used to sync the tagged users in the 'Comments' field. Let’s assume that your source application is Jira (cloud) and the destination application is Jira (on-prem). And you have tagged some users in the comments field of the source application and you want to sync them to the destination application. To sync the user details, in the Field Configuration screen, 

  1. Click to select Enable against the Enable User Search by option.
  2. Select email from the drop-down list.

When you do this, the user’s email address will be synced to the destination application. Also, the user details will be added to the Value Mapping section against the comments field and it will be used in future synchronizations.

In some scenarios, the user in the source application may not be present in the destination application or vice-versa. In such circumstances, you could use the advanced value mapping option available in the Value Mapping screen to map the source application user to the desired user in the destination application. Find out how.

For more information on syncing tagged users in the comments field, click here.

The 'Tagged User Synchronization' feature limits the ability to configure Comment Visibility Mapping from the UI. If you want to do this, import the value mappings based on the CSV definition as documented in the Import Value Mapping topic.