cancelling mass issues at once

[John Lord]

Hello,

I need to cancel about 400 issues and I do not want to have to do these manually. Is there a way to make an automation to do this? I tried in the sandbox to trigger the automation from a manual trigger but it looks like it only does it from the issue I am triggering it on from. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! 

[Aron Gombas _Midori_ · Accepted solution]

If you want to implement this with an automation rule (which is a good idea if it will need to be repeated in the future), then:

• it is true that the "Manual" trigger will only make the rule work only on that single issue on which the trigger link was clicked
• but it is possible to add another component to the rule which executes a CQL search and then passes the search results to the subsequent actions (basically ignoring/overriding the original issue which was clicked)

[Tommaso Gionfriddo _Teklada_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @John Lord ,

Whilst you can use an automation for this, which I'll briefly cover later, I would reccomend instead to simply use the bulk edit feature.

Bulk change

Here's Atlassian's documentation for the feature: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/edit-multiple-issues-at-the-same-time/

To summarise

1. Run a JQL/basic issue search to find all 400 of your issues
2. Click ... > Bulk change all x issue(s)
3. Select all desired issues by clicking the top checkbox
4. Select Transition issues and follow the UI prompts

Automation method

The simplest way to perform bulk changes via automation is to use the Scheduled trigger

1. Create an automation with a scheduled trigger, and tick Run a JQL search and...
2. Whatever actions are added to the automation will be performed for each issue found by the JQL search.
3. Enable the scheduled automation temporarily and select ... > Run rule
4. Once the automation has finished running, disable the rule so that it doesn't run again in the background.

[Ezgi Bayındır]

Hey @John Lord !

You can filter that 400 issues from issue navigator and click 3 fot icon. With bulk change all option, you can transition your issues to cancel status.