Retrieving past status of issue from automation

Question

Hi, I was wondering if it's possible to retrieve the status of an issue prior to the current one in an automation.  I currently have the following two automations:

* Manually triggered automation that clones an issue and changes its status to "Done".
* Automation triggered after issue creation very similar to this one, which copies the comments of the original issue into the cloned one.

What I need to do is to transition the cloned issue to the status of the original issue before being "Done".  I thought maybe I could retrieve it with the lookup issues and smart values, perhaps with something like "lookupIssues.last.changelog.status.fromString" or something along those lines, but I couldn't get anything I tried to work (possibly because the status of the original issue is already "Done" when the second automation is executed, I'm not entirely sure).

Do you have any idea if this is even possible?  I'm relatively new to Jira, but I'll try to provide additional information if needed.

Thanks in advance and hope to hear from you soon.

Vijay Dadi_b69v44 · Accepted Answer

Hello,

I would suggest having one custom field and have one automation with a trigger when issue is trigged.

Have edit issue step and copy the current status name to custom field. please try n see if it helps!

Thanks

Vj

Bill Sheboy · Accepted Answer

Hi @Carlos Piña López -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

First thing: what problem are you trying to solve by transitioning the cloned issue to the prior status of the original?  That is, "why do this?"  Knowing that will help the community to offer better suggestions.

Until we know that...

There are several ways to do what you ask, including:

* use another rule triggered on issue transition to "Done" which saves the prior status in a custom field, and use that custom field to transition the cloned issue
* when the issue is cloned, use the REST API to read the changelog of the original issue to find the prior status and then transition the clone to it

Before trying either of those, check if the workflow for the issue type allows transitions to from the first one to any possible status and if there are any transition conditions.  Those will be needed for the rule transitions to succeed.

Kind regards,
Bill