How to reopen a closed issue in Jira?

[Brian Dunk]

We would like to be able to Reopen a Closed issue in our Service Desk project.  We have tried to add this transition to our workflow without any success.  Can someone tell me specifically what we need to do to make this transition happen?

Thanks,

Brian

[Andy Heinzer · Accepted solution]

Hi everyone,
I wanted to post another answer here to see if it could help with other users that encounter this question.

Whether or not you can re-open a closed issue in Jira is dependent on the workflow that issue is using. Some workflows are configured to not allow this to happen. However there are a couple of different ways to do that.

Cause #1

The first is in regards to the way the workflow is setup to move between issue statuses. If the flow is a single direction, say Todo -> In progress -> Done, with no transitions that can be executed regardless of the current state, like so

workflows like this don't have a transition called re-open.  Also once the issue reaches the Closed state in this issue, there are no other outgoing transitions here.  In this workflow there is no where for this issue to go (short of using the move command).

In this case, you would need to copy the existing workflow, create some new status (optionally, like reopen), then create new transitions that allow you to move from this Closed status into your reopen status or some other status (like open again). Once this is saved in the workflow, you will need to assign this workflow to the issue type(s) in that project.

This can be a bit more confusing with Service Desk because your issue types can also have multiple request types. In that case, you just need to make sure that for the request type in question, you know what issue type those are, and adjust the workflow for that issue type. If you're not familiar with doing this, I'd recommend Working with Workflows https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/working-with-workflows-938847362.html

Cause #2

The other limitation can be in regards to a Workflow Property.   Let's say your workflow already has transitions to re-open, but you can't reopen this closed issue.  It's possible that the Closed status has a workflow property such as jira.issue.editable = false. If this is the case, users can't edit issues in that specific status. There are other workflow properties that can affect the end user's permissions to do something, outside the project's permission schemes.   In order to inspect or change this, you would need to edit the workflow in question and change/remove that specific workflow property AND then publish the workflow again.  Only then can you edit/change issues that might have been restricted by a workflow property.

I hope this helps to explain some possible causes of this common concern,

Andy

[Damian Ryan]

Great!

[Alexey Matveev]

You should add such a transition to your workflow. What was the problem?

[Brian Dunk]

So we added a transition from Closed to Reopened.  The button to fire the transition is not showing all all the project issues.

[Alexey Matveev]

You need to publish the draft of the workflow. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Or there may be more than one workflow in use in the project (the "not showing on all issues" makes me suspect you may have only added the transition to one workflow)

[Brian Dunk]

Sorry I meant "any Issues".  The Reopen option is not available on any issues.  Only  one work flow in this project.

[Alexey Matveev]

I guess, you have multiple workflows for your project and you should add the Reopen transition in all workflows.