Changed Project Key is not available

Question

I change Project Key KEYA into KEYB. There wasn't any Issue created, when I performed change Key operation.

Now I want to create a new JIRA-project, which should use a former Project Key (KEYA).

System says to me, that Project KEYA is in use, and not available. Why is that? Is there any way to tell a system, that KEYA is actually not in use?

Sandesh Shetty_fb9ccd · Answer

@Tuija Vuorinen

It is the expected behaviour & which is mentioned in the official documentation too.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/editing-a-project-key-938847080.html#Editingaprojectkey-changesNotesforchangemanagement

Martin Bayer _MoroSystems_ s_r_o__ · Answer

Hi @Tuija Vuorinen there is similar thread here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Can-not-create-jira-project-with-old-edited-project-key/qaq-p/77187 which describes how to remove "not-used" key to be able to use it again, but it is quite dangerous because project key is not information only for issues but for other Jira objects too.

You simply cannot use key which is OR was used for existing project. It is probably because of Jira provides following functionality:

* you have project with key ABC
* you create issue ABC-1
* you rename key to CBA
* issue ABC-1 is migrated to CBA-1
* Jira still lets you to navigate to the issue using ABC-1 key
* it still addresses objects like change items (history of the issue) etc.