Can you stop a user from clearing assignee while a ticket is "in progress"?

[Paul Mayeur]

Is it possible, that once a ticket has been moved to in progress and assigned you can not change clear the assignee. You can change it to someone else, but it can never be empty while in progress. Is that possible? Maybe if empty goes back to backlog.

[Nic Brough [Adaptavist] · Accepted solution]

Joe's disallow unassigned issues is the easiest and probably best answer, but you could also

• make it mandatory in the field config if you want to allow unassigned issues elsewhere
• put validators on the workflow, so that it can't have its status changed while the assignee is empty
• use a workflow property to disallow assign issues permission while it's in that status
• write a listener that picks up "assignee blanked out" and issue the transition back to the backlog
• write a listener that picks up "assignee blanked out" and puts back the previous assignee (annoying for the user, I'm not sure I'd ever recommend this, but the point is "listener catches it and does something")

[Paul Mayeur]

Yeah, I think listener is how I would do it.

[Joseph Pitt]

By clearing, I presume you mean setting it to unassigned. You need to setup JIRA not to allow unassigned issues and that will solve the problem. From my experience unassigned issues aren't worked because they don't appear in the assigned to me display.

[Paul Mayeur]

But I do want to allow unassigned issues for the backlog. Would this stop that?

[Nic Brough [Adaptavist]]

Yes - all issues would have to have an assignee at all times.