Adding transition to reopened status

[Barbara Shaw]

Hey all - new Jira admin here (again). We have an active workflow with a status of "reopened" that "all" statuses can transition to - but it has no transition path mapped back to any other status. It would make sense to me that a reopened status would transition back to an in progress status (determined by the project owner). Should I map a transition from "reopened" back to an in progress status like "investigate further"? Or does "All" mean that once you reopen that issue, you can transition to any status? AND if we reopen an issue should I follow steps to clear the resolution field? Appreciate advice on how to proceed. Thanks! 

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Barbara Shaw 

Can you show us your workflow diagram?

Here is a simple example workflow diagram.

When you see a Global transition like the one pointed to by the red arrow that means an issue in ANY valid workflow status can be changed to the status pointed to by All.

From Status >> To Status
All (Any)   >> In Progress

The Global transition indicates which statuses the issue can be in currently and then be changed to the destination status pointed at by the transition.

If you have a Reopen status in your workflow and Global transitions to other statuses in your workflow, then an issue in the Reopen status can be transitions to any status pointed to by a Global transition. In the workflow above, if I added a Reopen status, issues in the Reopen status could be transitioned to To Do, In Progress, or Done.

Here is another example workflow. In this case there are no Global transitions.

In this case the transitions indicate limited options:

From Status >> To Status
To Do       >> In Progress
In Progress >> Done

If I added a Reopen status to this workflow with a Global transition to it, that would allow issues in any status to change to Reopen, but not allow an issue that is currently in Reopen to change to anything else.

If I want to allow an issue in the Reopened status to change to the In Progress status, I would have to add a transition between those two statuses.

[Barbara Shaw]

@Trudy Claspill thanks for your thorough reply! Here is my workflow where I would like for a reopened issue to transition back to an in progress status

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello Barbara,

First, because you have said you are a new Jira Admin, I want to provide some additional related information.

Statuses get grouped into Status Category which is indicated by the color of the status.

Gray - "To Do" types of statuses meaning "work has not started"

Blue - "In Progress" types of statuses meaning "work has started but is not complete"

Green - "Done" statuses meaning "work has been completed".

You can use the Status Category when searching for issues to simplify your issue selection. For instance if you want to find all issues in any Status that is considered "In Progress" without have to list all the individual Status values, you can use this:

statusCategory = "In Progress"

That will retrieve all issues that are in a Blue status.

I bring this up because I see that your RE-OPENED status is blue, so technically it is part of the "In Progress" Status Category. I'm not sure if that is what you intended.

I also notice that your issues go directly to a Blue status when they are created. Typically issues go to a Gray (To Do) type of status when they are created to indicate no work has been started yet.

Now, looking at your workflow diagram, I see that for all your other Blue statuses none of them have a Global transition ( the ALL --> transition pointing to them). In order for your issues to go from the RE-OPENED status directly to any of those other Blue statuses you are going to have to create transitions from RE-OPENED to each of those other statuses.

The statuses RELEASED, READY FOR RELEASE, and WON'T DO all have Global transitions, so an issue can go from RE-OPENED to any of those three statuses, unless there is a Condition or Validator on the transitions that would prevent that.