Can I make a field mandatory on transition in a Team Managed project ?

Question

We have a field that we need to make mandatory across a number of projects on closing of the issue. I have done this fine in company-managed projects but it doesn't seem to be possible in Team Managed. I see you can make a field 'Required' but that would be on creation, we only want this on closing of the issue as it's an RCA field and people won't know what category to use on creation of an issue.

The workflow options in team-managed for this seem to limit to only checking for a specific value whereas I only want to check that the field is not empty.

Anyone know a way to do it ?

Thanks,

Fiona

Jaimie Konetchy · Answer

Our team managed project had the same challenge.  Here's what worked for my use case:

* In the workflow rule, select the transition and add a rule.
* For the rule type, pick Validate > Validate a field.

* From the "Validate that field" dropdown, select "isn't empty".
* In "For field(s)" choose your field(s).
* Enter the error message you want your users to see when the rule stops the transition.

Fiona Brown_zxgrxf · Answer

Thanks @Jack Brickey this was a great suggestion. I tried it but there's no way to let the user know they need to update the field. It just makes the transition not be available as an option if it's set to 'empty'

Jack Brickey · Answer

Hi @Fiona Brown , the following might work for you.

create two workflow rules:

* on Create add an edit fields rule to set the value of your field to an initial value, e.g. "empty" which equates to the field not yet being edited
* on transition to Done create a rule that restricts the transition if that field equals "empty"

Note 1: this doesn't work if someone deletes the "empty" and leaves blank. 
Note 2: I do not think you can check if a field is actually empty but I have not tried/investigated this.