Confluence Automation, act as different User
Asked by Antal Vig Communardo:

Hi Folks, I have a question around the actor in Confluence Automation.

If an automation is running all its changes are applied as the acting user. (as in Page changes etc.).   
One can only change this acting user to themselves, not assign it to someone else (unless you login as that user of course).

Now my question is (maybe to [@Avinoam](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/1163775) ?)  
Do you know of any way to assign this question to a bot user, or to a certain user that is defined in an webhook or so.

Reason for asking is the following:   
We're currently working on a solution for something that is heavily audited. And we use Workflows by Appfox to Control our Documents (fyi [@Craig Willson (AppFox)](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4002053) ?).  
We use Webhooks to sync the confluence Status with the Workflows status.  

![Bildschirmfoto 2024-08-06 um 09.13.08.jpg](/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/340178i239166CB07A1F847/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Bildschirmfoto 2024-08-06 um 09.13.08.jpg")

However if we look into the page history we see that all changes on the page are made by me (as the acting user of the Automation)![Bildschirmfoto 2024-08-06 um 09.13.53.jpg](/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/340179i2530A3D4409886E8/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Bildschirmfoto 2024-08-06 um 09.13.53.jpg")

Which is only partially true. ?

And our users would like to have a single overview of who changed what when. And the page history would be the ideal space, at it doesn't only contain the state changes, but the content changes as well.

Now our Webhooks payload coming from workflows is very simple:

```
{ 
"title": "${page.title}", 
"id": "${page.id}", 
"creator": "${history.createdBy.accountId}", 
"Status": "Draft" 
}
```

Actually even the default one, plus adding that line with the Status to see if we can make that run with one Automation not 4, which doesn't work, but thats a story for another day.   

The automation is the following:  
![Bildschirmfoto 2024-08-06 um 09.24.30.jpg](/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/340180i66E8ACE0669FAAA7/image-dimensions/282x230?v=v2 "Bildschirmfoto 2024-08-06 um 09.24.30.jpg")  

Now if we can use that "creator" from the payload (or any other type of user that we get from there) as our actor of the automation. This page history would be just the one we need. But we can't, currently.   
Is there any way to fix this, or do you have any plans to implent such a thing?  

Looking forward to any reply.

Antal


Answers:
author: John Funk
body: Hi Antal,

You should be able to change the actor - see this: "When configuring a rule, project/space admins, product-level admins, and site admins have the option to change the rule actor to someone else."

<https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/what-is-a-rule-actor/>

comments: author: Antal Vig Communardo
body: Thanks John. That is interesting. Seems the app works differently then the Documentation: ![Bildschirmfoto 2024-08-07 um 11.31.30.jpg](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/340461i0E15D8B9AE39F6A3/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Bildschirmfoto 2024-08-07 um 11.31.30.jpg")  
Says, As actor you can only assign yourself (I tried changing the language twice, still german, sorry)  
I'm org, product and space admin here and this behaviour is weird here.   

However I think it would be generally the best way if one could assign a bot user as actor and not just real users (just like in jira) and Ideally to solve my above usecase a smartvalue as actor.


author: John Funk
body: That's very strange. You should open a support ticket with Atlassian to see what they say.

<https://support.atlassian.com/contact/#/>

Please post back here with the resolution for future readers.

Good luck!


author: Connor
body: [@John Funk](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/7148) I think that's the intended functionality. The documentation you linked states:
> In **Confluence automation** , the rule actor is the person who created the rule.
>
> In Confluence automation, you can set the rule actor as yourself, but can't change it to someone else.

I've tried changing the rule owner and rule actor to someone else, same person for both, but was only able to change the rule owner. I haven't tried this yet, but I'd like to login as a service account and see if I can change the rule actor to the service account while leaving me as the rule owner. And if that doesn't work, see if I can change the rule owner and actor to the service account.

**Edit:** I just tested, and I can confirm while logged in as the service account I was able to change the rule actor to the service account while leaving the rule owner as my own account.


Tags: automation

cloud

confluence-cloud