Automation required screen change adds a value for manual transitions

Question

I recently had to change a legacy automation to the "new" automation type because I was locked out of editing.  During this process I had to add "Resolution" to a screen because the field was not available to the automation to be set.  For example, if the user comments on closed ticket, it automatically puts it back in progress and changes the Resolution to "incomplete".   However, now when agents make manual transitions that happen to use the same screen, the field is being set to a default value of "fixed" even though no Resolution is in play.  (i.e.   In most cases the manual transition shouldn't change the Resolution value at all.)   Note that these "screens" are not displaying for the agent, they just have the Resolution field attached to that the automation can see it.   I can make new "empty" screens for many of the manual transitions, but for the ones that can be both automated and manually activated, I'm not sure how to prevent the value from autopopulating.   Ideas?

Mikael Sandberg · Answer

No additional API calls or set ups are need, post functions are a Jira out-of-the-box feature. Here is an example and you can see that one of the options is Update an issue field. That is the rule used to update the resolution field.

Now, there are apps that extends the default rules by adding their own ones, like for example Scriptrunner that allows you to run scripts as part of the rules in the workflow, and that would require you to do more configuration, but normally the out-of-the-box rules should be enough. This KB goes over advanced issue workflow configuration.

Brandon Hennegan x368 · Answer

Ahh, thanks.  That is very good to know, I appreciate the reference regarding Resolution.   However, at first glance, post workflow seems to be a whole thing of it's own requiring API calls and lots of setup and configuration that doesn't currently exist in our cloud instance.  Are there other options that would be more straightforward?  (or perhaps I'm misunderstanding how the post workflow is implemented?)

Mikael Sandberg · Answer

I would recommend that you do not use "incomplete" as a resolution, because Jira then assumes that the issue has been resolved. Please have a look at Best practices on using the Resolution field.

Instead of setting the resolution via the automation I would recommend that you add a post function in the workflow that clears the resolution field when the request is moved out of the closed status. The post function would be on the status you are moving to. If you look at one of the default workflows like the simplified software workflow (I am using that as an example because it has the global transitions) you will see that the resolution field is cleared when moving to To Do and In progress and only set when moving to Closed.

The recommended way with the resolution field is that you should set it as a post function in the workflow and only add it to a screen if the user needs to manually select it.