Archiving a project caused automations to fail

Question

I archived a project that was no longer needed.

I have automations that are used by multiple projects.

When this project was archived the multi project automations used in this project started failing.

It was certainly unexpected behavior and I don't see anything in the atlassian documentation stating that prior to archiving projects you should remove them from the multiple project automations.

Has anyone else experienced this?

Grant Olson · Answer

@PATRICIA MURPHY I just had the some problem as you reported. Can you please share the link for the submitted issue?

PATRICIA MURPHY · Answer

Thank you @Trudy P Claspill

I will submit an issue.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @PATRICIA MURPHY

In what way was the project referenced by the Automation rule? Was it called out explicitly in the Project Scope? Was it explicitly referenced in steps within the rule?

What exactly were the failures that were experienced?

When a project is archived it is "hidden" from view for all functionality except for the Archived Projects page (and related APIs) and for direct URLs to individual issues. The contents of the project will no longer be returned by JQLs. Any project picker field will no longer include the project in its lists.

Additionally, no changes can be made to issues in the project while the project is archived. So any actions in Automation rules that should update, create, or delete issues in those projects would begin to fail.

Based on my understanding of archiving, the nature of archiving implicitly can have an impact on Automation Rules, but I do agree that there is perhaps inadequate documentation highlighting that explicitly.

You might want to provide feedback directly to Atlassian through the Give Feedback About Jira option, encouraging them to update the documentation concerning archiving projects to include information about the impact to Automation rules when this feature is used.