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How to automatically clone an issue to a different project when i move it to an active sprint?

Emily Kao

I still really new to setting up rules in jira automation. I want to be able to automatically clone issues from the active sprint in Project A (blue box) to the one in Project B (red box). And then be able to sync the status in Project B to reflect back to Project A issue status only in the active sprint (not the backlog).

So far, I tried running the cloning issue rule but I gave me an error message. (see below)

Can someone please let me know what is wrong with the rules and if I set up anything incorrectly?

Clone issue rule:

Clone issue.png

Error message after running Clone rule:

Cloned error.png

Sync status:

Sync status.png

Accepted answers

Trudy P Claspill

Hello @Emily Kao

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Before we address how you might accomplish that, can you tell us why you want to accomplish this? What problem are you trying to solve by have a copy of an issue in another sprint, but synchronizing updates from the copy back to the original?

As to why you might be getting the above error, that is likely has something to do with the project Types you are using. Can you tell us the project Type for each project? Get that information by going to the View All Projects page under the Projects menu. Find each project in the list. Tell us what it says for each project in the Type column.

All comments

Trudy P Claspill

Hello @Emily Kao

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Emily Kao

For the 2 projects we have 2 different teams that have access to them. Thus we only want to clone issues that we feel are ready to start being visible in the other project for the dev team to actively start working on it. As they move the status to in progress, done, we want to have the team that only has access to Project A to be able to get status updates. We don't want Project A team to see everything in Project B, just the cloned issues.

As for the project type, Project A is company-managed. Project B is team managed. Is that the reason why? Can I modify this if this is the issue?

Trudy P Claspill

Hello @Emily Kao

Thank you for that additional information.

Team managed projects are designed to allow for project-specific customizations that are isolated to that one project without affecting other projects, whereas Company Managed projects are designed to use entities that are defined globally and are shareable between projects.

The entities in Team Managed projects, like Issue Types, custom fields, and Workflow Statuses, may have the same names as entities used in Company Managed projects, but in the backend they are considered entirely separate entities.

For instance each issue type has both a name (i.e. Story) and a unique identifier in the database (i.e.10100). All Company Managed projects that have an issue type named Story are using the same issue type entity; the one with the ID = 10100. However the Story issue type in each Team Managed project has its own unique ID that is different from the one used by Company Managed projects.

In an Automation rule, if you use try to use the Clone Issue action to clone an issue between a Company Managed project and a Team Managed project (or between two TM) projects, you can't use the "Same issue type" option in that action. That option is not using the name of the issue type but rather its unique numeric ID to determine which type of issue you want to create. And, as I said, the unique IDs are going to be different in this case.

You would first need to change the Clone action to explicitly specify the type of issue you want to create in the destination project.

You will run into a similar problem with trying to synchronize the Status values. Even though the projects use Status values with the same name, the IDs in the backend are different. You won't be able to use the COPY FROM TRIGGER ISSUE option to update the Status of the source issues. To try to synchronize Status changes from the destination project back to the source project you would have to build logic into your rule to map the statuses between the projects.

There will likely be other hurdles to overcome in both trying to Clone the issue and in trying to make changes to the source issue based on the destination issue.

I know in the past there have been some issues in Automation Rules trying to work with issues that come from two different types of projects. I don't know what all of them were nor if they have all been resolved.

I may be possible to do, but it is going to take you a while to work through debugging the rules for each problem that comes up.

An alternative is to transition the team using Project B from using a Team Managed project to using a Company Managed project. Unfortunately there is not currently a feature flag to flip to do that. It involves setting up a new Company Managed project and optionally moving the issues from the TM project to the CM project. That process can also be problematic depending on what you want to move and the impact to historic data for Sprints. If the team has a fair amount of history in the TM project I often recommend that they start a new CM project, leave the historic data in the TM project, finish out in progress work in that project, and start only with new work and/or moving only issues that have not ever been in any sprints from the TM project to the CM project. In that scenario the cloning process and the status synch process will be easier to build. Or, alternately, you could just use a flag on the original issue to make it visible to the Project B team, create a board based on a filter for the Project B team, and add the issues to the Project B team's sprint instead of having them in the Project A team's sprint. That can all be done without cloning the issue.

Emily Kao

Thank you so much Trudy! I had tested it with 2 company managed projects and the cloning rule works now! It will add CLONE in the issue name.

However, the statuses are still not syncing. I have a feeling it's because the issues are not linked to each other. Is there any way to do that?

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