Skip status with approval if there are no approvers

Question

Hello, I'm setting up a custom workflow for purchase requests in Jira Service Desk. Here's a screenshot of the workflow:

I have three stages of approvals that I have set up. One is "Other approvers", which is a field specified by the user on creation of the ticket. This is where the user can include a supervisor if they need to. This field is totally optional, they can leave it blank if they don't need supervisor approval. The second stage is IT approval (field is hidden and auto-defined) where the IT team can verify the request is warranted, and the third stage is the fiscal team (field is hidden and auto-defined) that verifies the purchase is within budget. It's staged in this manner so people don't need to be bugged to approve something if it doesn't make it past the previous stage.

The problem is, when the "Other approvers" field is left blank by the user, the ticket sits on the "Awaiting other approvers" status with no way to transition to the next status. In the sidebar of the ticket, there's an approval section that says:

"Awaiting other approvers

1 approval needed

No approvers selected"

Is there a way to skip that status if there are no approvers selected? I'm pretty new to all this, so I appreciate the help!

Daniel Alonso · Answer

@Jason Freeman  What I see is that you are missing the left parameter

<> equals Empty. You need to add Approvers on the left of equals.

Jason Freeman · Answer

Hey, @Ryan Butler.

I'm trying to do exactly what you did, but I get the following error whenever the rule is triggered:

Error in the JQL Query: 'equals' is a reserved JQL word. You must surround it in quotation marks to use it in a query.

The full error is as follows:

"(key IN (IT-548) AND (("Customer Request Type" = "Colleague Updates (IT)") AND ( equals Empty)))" - Error in the JQL Query: 'equals' is a reserved JQL word. You must surround it in quotation marks to use it in a query. (line 1, character 82)

It's almost like it doesn't see {{issue.Approvers}} at all. That's why it says "AND ( equals Empty."  Right before the words "equals," I typed {{issue.Approvers}} like you did, but the error message doesn't even see it for some reason.

Have you seen this?

Ryan Butler · Answer

Thanks for the help. That plugin did allow me to add a button to click to transition to the next status, but in my search to automate that transition, i found another plugin called "Automation for Jira" that provided exactly what I needed. I set up a rule like the following, which will check new issues of type "Purchase Request" for the other approvers ("Approvers" field) to be empty, at which point it will trigger the transition to the next status. Here's a screenshot of what I setup, for anyone that may stumble across this same situation: