Order of subtasks change when I clone an issue with subtasks

Question

I have an issue set up for the purpose of using it as a template.  The plan is to cloning this template and it's subtasks to create new issues.  The subtasks are to be performed in a specific order.   When I clone the "template" issue, the order of the subtasks is not maintained.  Jira is consistently swapping the order of several of the tasks.  The first screenshot shows the template issue subtask order.  The second screenshot shows the clone of this issue.

Is there a way to ensure the order of the subtasks is preserved?

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Stephen Kaiser -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Until it doesn't work... :^)

Anything in automation rules doing multiple things / looping (e.g. branches which could be on multiple things) appears to run in parallel and asynchronously.  There is no defined processing order and no guarantee of when such branches will complete, up until the last rule step.  (I believe there are open backlog suggestions to add both "wait until done" and synchronous processing options to branches.)

And so a re-fetch inside of a branch would have no impact on the other processes running for other instances of the loop variable.  Any alignment is coincidental.

At this time, I believe the only ways to likely enforce the order are:

* unroll the loops and add issues one by one without branching
* use a marketplace addon to add issues sequentially
* build your own app, similar to a marketplace one

Kind regards,
Bill

Stephen Kaiser · Answer

I had modest success by adding a Re-fetch issue data step after the clone step. That seemed to add just enough of a delay to each iteration for the keys to be in the correct order. Order by created and rank still don't work well.

Marlene Kegel - codefortynine · Answer

Hi Tina,

I am Marlene the product manager of codefortynine.

Subtasks can be ranked, but it seems that the Jira standard clone function doesn't clone the Subtask rank.

If your use case requires this feature, you can try our Marketplace app Deep Clone for Jira. When you clone with Deep Clone for Jira the subtasks ranking will be carried over to the cloned subtasks.

Another workaround would be to create new templates and ensure they are created in the correct order. If you don't change the ranking afterwards , cloning should also work with the Jira default clone.