How to prevent adding cards to an Epic in Done status?

[Ann Rumenapp]

In a company-managed project, how can I prevent users from adding cards to an Epic in done status?

I've read the post: Solved: Can we restrict child creation under an Epic when ... (atlassian.com)

And updated the workflow done status properties, but this still allows me to create cards and assign to an Epic in done status.

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Ann Rumenapp 

Take a look at the answers on this post:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/Don-t-allow-choosing-closed-epics/qaq-p/813959

The post itself was originally applicable to self-hosted Jira rather than Jira Cloud, but the versions of the mentioned add-ons might provide the same functionality in Jira Cloud.

If you are not open to acquiring an add-on, then you will not be able to implement your requirement with native Jira functionality. The best you could do is use an Automation Rule to detect that an issue has been made a child of a completed Epic, and then remove it from that Epic in the Automation Rule.

[Ann Rumenapp]

We will not be getting a marketplace add-on for this issue.  I will write an automation rule for the project.

[Matt Parks]

The problem with the solution you linked (as I'm sure you discovered) is that it only prevents you from creating issues from the Epic itself and has no bearing on the Epic Link field, which is the real problem.

At first I was thinking that, if you had Scriptrunner, you could create a Behavior that would make the Epic Link field read-only in certain situations, but there's no way for the Behavior to know if the Epic is done until you've already added the value and updated the issue.

I guess you could create an Automation rule that triggers when the Epic Link field is updated and, if the Epic that was added is in the Done status, you clear out the Epic Link field.

I generally don't like doing this kind of thing unless my userbase is well aware that they're not supposed to do this, since it goes and un-does their edit after the fact. If you go this route, I would recommend that you send an email to the initiator to let them know what you did and why you did it.

[Matt Parks]

Note that I haven't tried to create the Automation rule, so I don't know exactly how to write it (or even it it's possible), but it seems like something that could be done.