Set link type through automation

[Max Boerma]

Hi, 

A little more background:
For my current project I want to be able to change my link type through an automation.

I've set up an automation to give the blocked by tickets in the blocked relation an impediment flag. The problem I ran into is that when several tickets are blocking I don't want the flag removed when one of the blocking tickets is set to done. I only want that to happen when all blocking tickets are closed. I know I can trigger an automation when no link types of a certain kind (blocks in this case) are remaining. 

However to make it harder, we want to keep the status so we can look it up at a later date and preferably not through a label. So what I did was create a new Link Type: was blocked and was blocking. When a ticket a blocking ticket is closed, I want the link type for that ticket to change to: was blocking. But I can't seem to get it to work.

Does anybody know how I can set a link type (was blocking) for a ticket? 

[Kian Stack Mumo Systems · Accepted solution]

@Max Boerma, 

I understand that you want to "unflag" a ticket when all tickets blocking it are resolved, but it sounds like you want to keep all the tickets linked together?

You are actually able to do that without switching the link to another type. I wrote an automation rule that will do that for you. The only caveat with this rule is that it will only work within a single project. Check out the configurations below:

This will run each time a ticket in my project is resolved, this rule will run. It will check if the ticket resolved "Blocks" any other ticket. If it does, it will check the ticket it blocks to see if all tickets blocking that ticket are resolved. 

If they are, it will clear the impediment flag. This way you don't need to change the link types at all!

[Max Boerma]

Thank you! I was wondering, we're using a board that filters in several different projects. What makes this not work across projects? Because it is possible to set an automation to several projects right? Or will this simply not check across projects?

[Kian Stack Mumo Systems]

I shouldn't have said that it "won't work". That's not actually true. The issue that I was thinking about is that any automation rule which runs across multiple projects is considered a global rule. With the standard plans, you only have 500 global executions/product/month.

It's unlikely that you'll have 500 flagged tickets over the course of the month, but you have to run the rule each time a ticket is resolved. If you resolve too many tickets, you'll exceed your execution limits and the rule will stop working until the start of the new month.

[Max Boerma]

Oh thanks for the heads up. We're not using a lot of automations at the moment and will probably have somewhere close to 60-70 resolved items every 4 weeks. But it's good to keep an eye out for. 

I slightly tweaked your automation and made it trigger on the transition to either closed or resolved because one of our projects does not use the resolution field. It works perfectly at the moment, so thank you for your help!

[Anita Kalmane]

@Max Boerma , I'm trying to put the same automation as you did - to give the blocked by tickets in the blocked relation an impediment flag, but something seems to be going wrong in this. Could you please help and paste screenshot on how you've set it up?

[Max Boerma]

Hi Anita!

Of course, what I did was this: 

The current issue is the origin (the issue that blocks the other) and the destination Issue is the blocked ticket. I gave them both labels (added blocks-ticket & blocked).

I also use a second automation rule to remove the flag when blocking items move to resolved/closed. A bunch of those are messages I automatically send to slack so and edit labels, so you can ignore those. 

I hope this helps!

[Anita Kalmane]

@Max Boerma , super, that's useful, thanks! I've been able to create the first automation and it even says 'success' although there is no flag added, that's weird... I'll check with another colleague who has more experience, but this has been already helpful.

[John Funk]

Hi Max - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Why don't you just create a new custom field - maybe single pick list or Checkbox. Then place a value of Yes in the field when it gets flagged.