How to Change Ranking of issues using Bulk Editing or other kind of scripting/filters

[Mauricio Gracia]

I was reading about the Bulk Edition feature of JIRA

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Modifying+Multiple+%28Bulk%29+Issues#ModifyingMultiple%28Bulk%29Issues-bulkedit

Is there any way to do a Bulk Edit on the Ranking of Issues to make for example all the High Priorioty issues be ranked on top ?

If not by Bulk Edit is it posible to achieve that by use of scripting or filters ?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

No.

The problem here is that a rank is a reference to a unique place in a list - each rank effectively describes a position between two other items - "I'm above that one and below the other". Bulk edit changes a field (or set of fields) to a set value. Because the ranks are effectively unique, you can never logically bulk-edit more than one.

I've seen a couple of scripts that did re-ranking, but they were crude and clumsy to be honest, and very focussed on one fixed end goal.

[Mauricio Gracia]

Do you by any chance have links for any of those scripts and how to run them ?

[Jeremy Walker]

We really need some way to do this.  We have multiple sub-teams working on our project and each sub-team has its own Agile board and has control over the ranking of issues on their board.  Whenever we reassign an issue to a different sub-team (based on a custom field called "sub-team"), the issue will move to the other sub-team's board.  The problem is that is retains its rank, and there's no way to reset the rank so that the new sub-team has a chance to rank it on their own board.  We'd like to be able to do a bulk edit "send to bottom of backlog", but also do this on an individual issue on the "edit" screen.

[Marcel van der Vliet]

Totally agree, I am also looking for this feature. We have a lot of "legacy" tickets and slowly cleaning up over time. Now we are close to remove all the filters which means that I want to bulk update the ranking. Move a lot of tickets to the top or the bottom of the list.

[JamieA]

> Is there any way to do a Bulk Edit on the Ranking of Issues to make for example all the High Priorioty issues be ranked on top ?

Why would you want to do that though... if that was your goal you can just sort by priority.

What about people who have already ranked their issues, you're just going to re-rank them?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Very true - the problem with any automated/bulk re-ranking is that it could easily mess up everything your users have already set up.

[Mauricio Gracia]

Jamie this is for a proyect that has issues but no one has rank them. What I want is to see them order by priority but on the board not a ListView or SearchResult

[Mauricio Gracia]

nobody has done any ranking

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Well, you could get the users to start ranking them - the priority is shown on the planning board, and you can easily select batches of issues, right-click and push the selection to the top or bottom.

You'd need to weigh up the value of asking the users to do that over the effort required to script it (the stuff I saw was for a much older version of Greenhopper/Agile, and we really did decide it wasn't worth the hours spent getting the script over getting the users involved, even for a couple of thousand issues)

[Mauricio Gracia]

Jamie for future referece try to answer the question insted of judging the need or the aproach, specially for somebody that does not have enough karma to downvote