Workflow transitions

Question

Hi

I created a new status in my workflow, and needed to create a transition back to the workflow. However its not letting me edit; with a notification saying I cannot perform the operation on a draft workflow.

Please confirm if I discard the draft that is currently in existence to create this transition, that the existing tickets in the project wont all loose their components/status'/SLA's etc

Thanks

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Ah, you've run into a honking great bug in Jira.

This is something that only affects admins, it can easily be avoided, and has a well-documented and solid work-around.  It's also quite a pain to fix in the code, and things are gradually moving away from doing it all this way, so you can imagine why Atlassian have it as a spectacularly low thing to fix.

You can't add transitions to existing dead-end status in the draft mode.  Experienced Jira admins avoid it by always having a transition out of every status, even if they're dummy transitions with conditions preventing them ever being visible.

But when you run into it, the fix is to go into the workflow list (Admin -> Issues -0> workflows) and copy the workflow.  This gives you a new workflow that is not associated.  You can edit that and add the new transition to it.

Then, go into the workflow scheme(s) using the old workflow and replace the old one with the new edited one.  This will cause migrations, but they shouldn't be hard.

unknown · Answer

Hi Nic - please see my screenshot - I have tried to amend the workflow by adding a missing transition for a status, however I get the below error. Can you please tell me how I'm going wrong & how I can update my workflow.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

You will not loose anything - the new workflow does not remove anything and it does not apply to any issues until you say it will.