Suppose I created a project whose code is SO. Now, I created an epic and that is denoted as SO-1. After that, I added an user story under the epic. Jira by default denoted the user story as SO-2. Is there any other way to denote as a sub-number?

Question

I am facing this whenever I create a sub-task of any kind whether it's sub-task under an user story or an user story under an epic. The number is added incrementally like SO-1, SO-2, SO-3. So, I am not able to distinguish between sub-task and task easily.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

No, as I already said, it's a simple counter.  But you don't have to reset it to 0, you can set it to anything you want.

You must delete all the issues created with a number higher than the one you are going to set the counter back to.  (For moved issues, you could destroy the issue history instead of deleting them though.  More complicated to execute, but possible)

Stop JIRA, take a full database backup, then go to the project table - there's a field in there with the counter in it (I think it's pcounter).  You need to set that to the next number you want to use in the project (Edit - from memory, that might not be right, it might be the "last number created" - 0 for an empty project)

Sandeep Kumar D · Answer

If a user has created a total of 3 issues, s/he can delete all the issues without much pain and can start afresh by amending the database as you told. But what if, if a user has created 100 issues  such as SO-1 to SO-100 and wants to delete SO-99. That means, after that the count will go like SO-1 to SO-98, SO-99 missing forever, SO-100 and so on.

And, it would be much pain then to delete all the 100 issues and amend the database to adjust the numbering.

Could you please let me know the procedure to reset the counter.

Thanks

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Each new issue increments the project counter.  JIRA doesn't go looking for empty spaces in the sequences (and with good reason - it's slow, pointless and the holes in a sequence are still information, even if there's no data), it just uses the next number.

In older versions of JIRA, you can reset the counter by deleting the project and recreating it.  Newer versions preserve the information that there was a project there, so you can't create new ones with a key you had before.

Your only option in later JIRAs is to reset the counter by amending the database, after making 100% sure that you deleted all issues that were in that project (even if they've been moved to other projects, you still need to delete them)