cancelling mass issues at once

Question

Hello,

I need to cancel about 400 issues and I do not want to have to do these manually. Is there a way to make an automation to do this? I tried in the sandbox to trigger the automation from a manual trigger but it looks like it only does it from the issue I am triggering it on from. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Tommaso Gionfriddo _Adeptask_ · Accepted Answer

Hi @John Lord ,

Whilst you can use an automation for this, which I'll briefly cover later, I would reccomend instead to simply use the bulk edit feature.

Bulk change

Here's Atlassian's documentation for the feature: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/edit-multiple-issues-at-the-same-time/

To summarise

* Run a JQL/basic issue search to find all 400 of your issues
* Click ... > Bulk change all x issue(s)

* Select all desired issues by clicking the top checkbox
* Select Transition issues and follow the UI prompts

Automation method

The simplest way to perform bulk changes via automation is to use the Scheduled trigger

* Create an automation with a scheduled trigger, and tick Run a JQL search and...
* Whatever actions are added to the automation will be performed for each issue found by the JQL search.
* Enable the scheduled automation temporarily and select ... > Run rule
* Once the automation has finished running, disable the rule so that it doesn't run again in the background.

Aron Gombas _Midori_ · Accepted Answer

If you want to implement this with an automation rule (which is a good idea if it will need to be repeated in the future), then:

* it is true that the "Manual" trigger will only make the rule work only on that single issue on which the trigger link was clicked
* but it is possible to add another component to the rule which executes a CQL search and then passes the search results to the subsequent actions (basically ignoring/overriding the original issue which was clicked)