Changing Order of the Workflow Transition Buttons

[Bryan Trummer - ReleaseTEAM]

I am having an issue with this. I follow the following items list of doing so. My question or concern is where it says property values of 10,20,30 this don't match the transitions numbers (the one in the parenthesis) I want them to be in. When I use that number next to the transition it still doesn't work. I am sure I am missing something easy here.

To change the order of transition buttons:

To change the order of transition buttons, including additional transitions in the Workflow menu, add the property key opsbar-sequence to each workflow transition that you wish to reorder. Each opsbar-sequence property key requires a property value that defines the order of the transition action on issue views.

1. Go to the transition's properties, as described in Transition properties above.
2. Type opsbar-sequence into the Property Key field, under 'Add New Property'.
3. Type a value In the Property Value field, The value must be a positive integer (starting at '0'); it defines the order of the transition buttons on issue views.
   Consider using a sequence of opsbar-sequence property values like 10, 20, 30... to allow new transitions to be easily added later.
4. Click Add.

 Adding the opsbar-sequence property to a workflow transition does not change the order of these transitions in the workflow in Text edit mode. The addition of this property only affects the order of transitions on the View issue page.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

The id of the transitions has nothing to do with the sequence, you can ignore them.  Use 10,20,30 in the properties, it'll work fine.

[Matt Parks]

Is there a way to re-order the transitions on a Kanban board? I have two transitions from Prod Build into Done, one of which is the 'All' transition into Done, which has a transition name of 'Canceled', which sets the Resolution to Canceled. The other transition name is Done and sets the Resolution to Successful. The Done status is the only status in the column on the board.

Currently, the 'Canceled' transition is the one that is on top, but I'd like to move it to the bottom, as it is more likely that users who aren't really paying attention will drag it to the top. Unfortunately, I have not found a way to change the order of the transitions.

I tried setting the opsbar-sequence properties on the two transitions and, while this does successfully change the order of the transitions on the issue, it doesn't impact the board. I also tried changing the transition names (on the off-chance that it was sorting alphabetically), but this didn't have an impact either.

Any insight you could provide would be appreciated. If there's no way to alter the order, is it possible to hide certain transitions from the Kanban board (so they're only visible on the issue itself)?

Thanks,
Matt

[congstar GmbH]

Hey Matt Parks,

did you find a solution for this? We do have a "Closed" status with different resolution values like 'Work Finished' and 'Deleted' and we would like to have the 'Work Finished' option above the 'Deleted' drop zone on the Agile Board.

[Matt Parks]

Unfortunately, I never did figure it out (or get an answer from someone who does know), so it seems like this is something that can't be done.

As at least one other person has mentioned, the opsbar-sequence property doesn't have an impact on Kanban boards, only on the workflow transition buttons on the issues.

There was also a suggestion to, in the column configuration, move the statuses within the column in the order that I'd like them to be, but this didn't have an impact on my board.

[Martin Gregory]

What is the status of transitions with no property, compared to those that do have the property?

[Adam Dulberg]

Hello Matt,

If I understand correctly, you’re speaking about the Kanban board view and not about the workflow transitions. There is a difference here since the Kanban board can be modified independently than rhe workflow. 

Under “Board Settings”, you can add columns and name them whatever you’d like. In that Column view, you can assign the applicable workflow statuses which will dictate how an issue can be moved across the Kanban board. Remember that the transitions themselves will not show up on a Kanban board - the board is a representation of the “status” of a given ticket, and how that ticket moves, is a property dictated by the transition which is visible on the ticket. 

The Columns do not have an impact on the ticket lifecycle, however it is best practice to setup the columns with statuses in order so a ticket moves in one direction. 

Long answer; but remember status is a visual representation of where a ticket is in the lifecycle, and a transition is the pathway to connect the statuses. So on a Kanban board, you will not see the transitions. 

[Matt Parks]

Adam,

For some reason, I did not see your reply, but here I am, two years later (and at a different company).

I understand how statuses work on a Kanban board, but the problem I am experiencing is when there are multiple transitions to the same status (e.g. one transition to "Done" sets the Resolution to "Done" while another brings up a transition screen and sets the Resolution to "Canceled").

Is there a way to set the order so that the first transition shows up above the second when dragging the issue from one column to another? There is only one status in the destination column.

Thanks,
Matt

[Candace Phelps]

Hello Atlassian & Community,

Our team has the same question. We'd like to reorder the Workflow Transition steps to match the order in which they usually appear.

Like Bryan Trummer, I've also added the properties to each of the workflow steps as per the documentation. Like Bryan, this also did NOT reoder the Workflow Transition steps as the documentation seemed to imply it would (as suggested in the links below):

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/JIRA-questions/re-order-Issue-workflow-buttons/qaq-p/383261

https://modem7.wordpress.com/2013/10/25/reorder-jira-workflow-buttons/

a) Can someone provide an accurate solution to this question?

b) @atlassian: can you update your documentation to make it more clear? It's quite foggy. ;)

Thanks to any and all!

Candace

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I'm not sure what you're reading - the post Bryan gave from the docs is quite clear on the steps, and it works fine on both the Server and Cloud installations I've recently been working on.

The accurate solution is in the question already.

[Candace Phelps]

Hi Nic,

So I've added the opsbar-sequence property values like 10, 20, 30 but this doesn't affect the order in which the values appear in the Workflow button.

I've set the values like this: To Do: 10, In Progress: 20, Ready For Testing: 30, Testing: 40, Done: 50, Cancelled: 60

I'm expecting the values to show in the dropdown in this order:

Ready For Testing, Testing, Done, Cancelled

But instead I still see them in this order: Done, Testing, Ready For Testing, Cancelled.

Any suggestions?

Thanks, Candace

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No suggestions, it should work (and does in my workflows)

Could you show us the property for "ready for testing" on the transition?

[Candace Phelps]

Hi Nic,

Absolutely, here's a screenshot of the property for "ready for testing" (still called "Dev Done" in some places). Do you see any issues with this?

Thanks!

Candace

[Patrick Busch]

Hi,

looks like have added it to the workflow step, but you must add it to workflow transition itself

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Patrick has it right on the nose.  All the docs say to apply properties to the transition, and that does work.

(Sorry, I didn't see the comments earlier, as Lithium's email system was broken until more recently)

[Candace Phelps]

Wow, thanks Patrick and Nic. This is quite tricky to find the right feature / option, but I think I've got it now. I'm recording what I did here in case anyone else is looking for this in future:

1. Navigate to the draft workflow

Jira > Issues > Workflows

2. Click on the Transition(id) to be edited

3. Click View Properties for that transition

4. Add the opsbar-sequence key with the appropriate number

e.g. For the Ready For Testing transition, I added:

opsbar-sequence = 30

5. Click Add

6. Repeat steps #2 - #5 for the other steps that need to be reordered

Note: editing a Transition that is part of one step will update the Transition everywhere it is used.

7. When you are done your edits, click Publish Draft. You will get a popup asking if you want to save a copy of the previous version.

8. Enjoy your reordered steps! :)

[Charles Rodriguez Beauregard]

Thanks Candace.
The explanation was perfect and easy to implement.

Regards.

[Tim Straub]

Great explanation - works perfect.

[Isaac Rickert]

Those photos helped me out a ton. I appreciate the walkthrough!

[JP Pickel]

Thank you for the clear step-by-step instructions, Candace! I never would've figured that out on my own 🙂

[Adam Dulberg]

Is there support for this feature on the new view? I am familiar with this property and all changes made to the "old" view work properly, but the same functionality does not appear to be supported yet on the new view. 

Could someone from Atlassian confirm if this functionality is supported during the beta phase?

Thanks

[Haiz Oppenheimer]

Same here. This does not appear to work in the "New View."

[Martin Gregory]

Can we also get confirmation that it will be supported when the "New View" exits beta (IE before the current view goes away).

[Peter Reiser]

Did anyone get feedback from Atlassian regarding the broken new view status order ? 

[Retmer van Dongen]

It seems that this doesn't influence the order of the Transitions in a Kanban Board if you map multiple statusses in one column. Does anybody know how to influence the vertical order of transitions there?

[Bill Latham]

In the Kanban board in the Board Settings/Columns, you can drag and drop the stacked workflow states into your preferred order.

[Julia Anderson]

^ That does not work for me :( Anyone else?

[Eszter]

I have found a solution for this, redraw the transitions from the last but one status and start with the one you need at the top. Also see my answer below.

[Matt O_Toole]

It also doesn't appear to work when you've got a workflow where all statuses can lead to any other status. 

Attached is our current Engineering workflow.

And yet, the drop-down is a completely different order and I've set the ops_sequence key from 10=>140 for all the above statuses.

It's frustrating our engineers....

[Eric Rogier-Lacroix]

check obsbar-sequence versus obsbar_sequence that you mentionned

hope it helps :-)

[Deleted user]

I just went through the process for obsbar sequence (thank you to all with this advice!) and that helped me get the order consistent.  When all statuses can move to every other status, than the Workflow order will be static.  One thing that I did was to include a number in the name of the workflow, status, and transition.  

(Yes - this is a ridiculous number of steps. We are trying to separate work that is actively in progress for separate teams from work that is not.  I may go through and refine the transitions to limit movement between the statuses.  This is my first attempt at a custom workflow in Jira.)

[Tanya C]

Not too ridiculous.  Our team was 'forced' to make a workflow with about 75 steps.  :(  

[Adam Dulberg]

Beth,

Why would you create a workflow that allows an issue to be transitioned anywhere beyond perhaps a couple of applicable steps? One of the benefits of the workflow transitions is to help reduce some of the clutter and confusion by forcing only a few options at each status. Per the image above, an issue could in theory go directly from "New" to "Test". Or even, "Ready to Close" back to "Evaluate". This doesn't make sense.

If this is actually part of your process, I'd be curious to learn about its use-case and the benefit it provides.

[Tanya L Christensen]

That image is a simplified workflow which can be created and managed from an agile board.  Such flows have different behaviors, but still allow for properties to be set.  

If the team is working solely from the agile board it works great.  

It does allow for status skipping though, which can be good or bad. 

[Abby Kaske]

So did the opsbar-sequence actually apply here or is it just pulling alphabetical? 

I've been trying to get a certain order on a Kanban board (new view), but I'm not having any luck.

- First, I tried adding the opsbar-sequence on transition(id), but that didn't work.

- Second, I added a transition between every status to every other one (had previously been using the "All" option, but thought the actual transition might be needed for opsbar-sequence to work)

- Third, I've tried re-ordering the statuses in the global Status setting

- Fourth, I've tried banging my head against a wall because nothing seems to be working here, and it keeps ordering by alphabetical by status type (gray a-z/blue a-z/green a-z)

I really hate my workflow diagram looking so messy, so I'm tempted to just give up and put it back to how it was before. But, if someone has recently gotten the sorting to work, I'd love to know how!

Update: it does seem to be working for the old view.

[Todd Alden]

So a couple of questions on this topic (I get that I can set the order with the property):

1. How does Jira determine the default (w/o setting the property) order?
2. The global list of statuses already has an order, and that order already determines things like the order status show in a 2 dimension gadget.  Why does Jira not use this same order for the default order in the workflow pull down on the view screen?  Seems like an obvious way for the default behavior, yet this does not seem to be the case.

[Carolyn Nelson]

Regarding the initial question about setting the order of the transitions shown on the Issue View screen; it's not explained very well in the documentation, but this video shows how it is done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKrzm6PrY7w

What was confusing to me is that I am used to setting a property to restrict the list of available options for Resolution where you are listing all the values you want for that transition.  So the documentation saying to set the opsbar-sequence with values like 10,20,30 made me think I was listing the order I wanted all the statuses in each transition.  But this is not how it works.  You are assigning a value (and only one value) to the specific transition in the property.  After that, Jira will display the status transition buttons on the issue screen in ascending numerical order based on the number you assigned that step in the Property.  

Not sure if this helps anyone or just makes in more confusing :-)  Watch the video.

[Eszter]

I have just found a solution for the problem with Kanban view and Done not being at the top of the column:

as stated before, this has to do with the order of transitions in the text view of a workflow. However, I haven't seen any solution as to changing them so here is what I have found:

If you delete the status, and redraw the transitions, draw the done transition first and then the others. In the text view of a workflow the order is depending on which one you have drawn in the diagram first (probably this is possible to do when creating transitions in the text view too.)

For example for me the problem was that won't fix was at the top for this status:

So I have deleted the ready to deploy status and then redrew the transitions, beginning with done.

This has indeed solved the problem in the kanban board!

[Peter Reiser]

Hi Eszter 

Do you use the Jira Cloud or Server version ? 

[Eszter]

cloud

[Peter Reiser]

Then opsbar-sequence property values  are broken in the  Jira Cloud new issue view 

There is a bug report for this.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-70702

Please add yourself to the "affected customers" list  on this bug if you want to get it fixed

[Mark Hanson]

Does anyone know what the order of transitions in the new issue view is currently based on? I see two requested solutions (restore the opsbar-sequence functionality, and base it on the order of statuses).  But is it now just random?

[Deleted user]

We are using JIRA cloud. My plan was to have "Done" on the top and "Rejected" on the bottom of the 'Done" column on the board. None of the before mentioned solutions worked, however as I made the workflow Simplified (Board settings:Column management: Simplify workflow) it got solved. I hope this is helpful.

[erick.mirandamarquez@telefonica.com]

I resolved it with the opsbar-sequece. I Have my answer in a upper post.

[Shane Martin]

Even setting opsbar-sequence for me (in Cloud) didn't change the order the statuses appear in a shared column either? Is opsbar-sequence the right one to set? it doesn't change the transition id (i.e. 11, 21, 31 etc..) that seems to be controlling the order.

[Fummi Ayorinde]

Hi Nic, I have added the ops-bar sequence option but still I don't see my workflow statuses in the drop down. I know you mentioned this should be done in the transition section as well. But how do you this? I have updated the property keys and values for all my workflow steps but it is still not showing as a drop down. Please help.

[Fummi Ayorinde]

Basically, I want to be able to see my statuses in a drop down like this picture. How can I do it?

[Abby Kaske]

Hey Fummi,
Hopefully you found the answer, but just in case:
if you're not seeing all of your statuses in your dropdown, it's because the transition between them doesn't exist. This has to do with the Workflow (https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver072/working-with-workflows-828787890.html)
If you only have the workflow allowing transitions from To Do to In Progress, In Progress to Testing, and Testing to Done, then they will only show the statuses available to them from their current state.
If you have the statuses of "To Do" "In Progress" "Testing" and "Done", in order for all available statuses to show in the status drop down, you need to have transitions for:

To Do - In Progress
To Do - Testing
To Do - Done
In Progress - To Do
In Progress - Testing
In Progress - Done
et c.
*OR, the easier option is to check off the box for "Allow all statuses to transition to this one" (which you will see when you click on a Status in the workflow editor)* 

The order display issue being discussed in this chain is about the order that they display in that dropdown (which might just be broken in new view.)

[erick.mirandamarquez@telefonica.com]

Great solution, 

In my case, just I needed to move one of them, for that, only add the value opsbar-sequence in the transition I wanted to move.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Set the number to be lower than the one you want it to appear before.

[erick.mirandamarquez@telefonica.com]

Excellent!!!

Thanks in advanced

[Bar T]

Hi folks, do you make the opsbar change on the transition (link) or the state (button) itself? I always get confused because I thought I see the option on both.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The state button does not really exist, it's a list of transitions with the end state displayed instead of the transition name.   You need to alter the transition order, but I'm not sure the button takes any account of it.

[Urszula Forenc]

Hi, what does it mean, when opsbar-sequence is 11 or 21?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It means the property has that value.  I'm not sure what your question is.

[Urszula Forenc]

Sorry, I was not specific. I mean, that 20 is that button is on a second position, 30 on a third.... But when it is 21 or 31? What is this 1?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It's a number.  21 is smaller than 31.  The actual number is not important, just that it's larger or smaller than another

[Urszula Forenc]

Ok, thank you.

[Fabiano Nascimento Leite]

It seems that doesn't influence the order of the Update Parent Issue in a Scrum Board when the last sub-task is closed if you map multiple statuses in last column.

[Shea Martin]

This doesn't seem to work in the Cloud instance.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Are you spellling the property correctly?  That's the mistake I usually make.