My workflow is stuck in an Unpublished changes loop

[Ronald Vallenduuk]

I have a workflow. When I view it there's a banner that says "There is a draft with unpublished changes". When I click 'View draft' I see the workflow in edit mode with a banner "There are unpublished changes. Do you want to publish this draft now?"

I click 'Discard Draft', get a warning, click 'Discard' again and a little popup tells me "The draft workflow was discarded". Great.

So I click Edit. I see the workflow in edit mode with a banner "There are unpublished changes. Do you want to publish this draft now?"

I click 'Publish Draft', select 'No I don't need a backup', click 'Publish' and a little popup tells me "The draft workflow is now active". Great.

So I click Edit. I see the workflow in edit mode with a banner "There are unpublished changes. Do you want to publish this draft now?"

This seems to repeat forever. Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Er, if you click "Edit", you are creating a draft workflow that is unpublished. That's the point of the "edit" process.

Stop clicking "Edit" and you won't get the message.

[Ronald Vallenduuk]

But without clicking edit I'm in view mode. How am I supposed to add a transition without going to edit mode first?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Adding a transition is an edit to the workflow. So you click edit, to edit the workflow, which creates a draft, which then warns you that you have a draft workflow that is not in use yet.

There are two states here - either you are looking at a workflow, or you have an unpublished draft which you are changing.

I don't understand the problem. What do you expect if you click edit?

[Raju KC]

When you click Edit, even you haven't made any changes, message is displayed. You don't need to be worry. Continue making changes and when complete, just publish it.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Exactly - you're either editing a workflow, or you are not.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The banner is warning you that you're in edit mode. Many people find this useful. It does not suggest in any way that I can see that there is another draft, it seems clear that it's about what you're working on at the moment.

I don't know what you mean by "restrictions" when you go into edit mode. There's a warning banner telling you that you are editing. Not a restriction

Anyway, now you seem to be reporting a real problem. There is a known flaw/bug in the editor here. It seems like complete nonesense that you suddenly can't add outgoing transitions just because there are none in the original workflow, and I have no clue why this is such a problem for Atlassian to fix. But we're stuck with the bug for now. The fix is to copy the workflow, as that leaves you with an "inactive" workflow, which you can do more with.

[Ronald Vallenduuk]

Thanks for the quick replies. If I'm editing then obviously there's a draft version that I'm working on, there doesn't need to be a banner to tell me so. This warning suggests that there's another draft somewhere.

When I click Edit I expect to just go to edit mode without restrictions.

I am trying to add a transition but I get a popup "Readonly - You are editing a draft workflow. The step ''Closed'' has no outgoing transitions in the Active workflow, so you cannot add any outgoing transitions in the Draft workflow".

[Jim Anderson]

As I learned from hitting this myself, always create an outbound transition from every state before you assign the workflow to a scheme, etc. Otherwise, as Nic says you have to create a copy, and replacing the existing with the new version can be a tedious exercise.

[Ronald Vallenduuk · Accepted solution]

Ok, it's all kinda clear now...

I misunderstood the banner to be a warning another unpublished version. I think the banner is a bit over the top; a Save button would also tell me that I'm in edit mode.

The banner only appears when you're editing a workflow that is assigned to a scheme. I hadn't realised that connection so the banner seemed to suddenly appear.

Then on top of that there's the bug about the outgoing transitions which confused me even further.

[Christoph Neumann]

wow, this issue is almost 8 years old, and it's still essentially unsolved. I am hitting exactly the same roadblock here. JIRA needs much more care from its owners, the UX with JIRA as a power user is not satisfactory

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It's not unsolved at all, there was nothing to fix in the original report, it was the poster not quite seeing what it was doing.

The secondary "can't add outgoing transitions to status that don't already have them in draft mode" bug was fixed in Jira 7.something.  (7.6 from memory)