Transition or Workflow Property that lets you "skip" a step?

[Darryl Lee]

Hi all!

Years back, I was working on SOX-compliant workflow, and we decided that we needed to "skip" some steps if the field "SOX Yes/No" was set to No.

I recall finding some workflow or transition property that you could only assign by editing the XML and manually inserting it that basically worked like this:

If you get to this step in the workflow (which would only happen if the "SOX Yes/No" field was set to No), then "skip it" or rather, automatically go to the next step.

I'm not having much luck googling it, as I recall it was one of those not-often used tricks. :-/

Thanks!

[Darryl Lee · Accepted solution]

Thanks all, I had an old colleague look it up for me, and here's what I documented:

The transition only ran if with the following conditions:

If SOX Yes/No = Yes

Additionally, the transition was hidden from the user, so could only be triggered programmatically or from a workflow function

I believe I used JMWE for this. And in the end, all the transition did was Set Developer = Assignee.

But here's the tricky part. I had to export the workflow to XML, add auto="true" to the parameters for the action (transition), and then reimport the workflow. So it looked like this: 

<action id="91" name="Auto-SOX Yes" auto="true">

And of course, I found this trick here, although it's not well-indexed by Google anymore.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Automatic-workflow-transition/qaq-p/341909

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/What-is-your-most-valuable-Jira-quot-trick-quot/qaq-p/258030

While it's important to document this, since it's effectively invisible in the UI, I found it was really interesting that it's part of OpenSymphony:

@Igor Sereda [ALM Works] wrote in 2012:

I don't think this is documented for JIRA, but there's some documentation in the OpenSymphony project.

And wow, OpenSymphony, huh, I didn't know anything about that:

http://oswf.sourceforge.net/tutorial/index.html

Anyways, mystery solved, for me anyways. :-}

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I've done this a lot.  Let's say your workflow is open -> needs approval -> approved but you want to be able to skip "needs approval" sometimes.

You add a transition from open to approved, but add a "condition" to it, one that will hide the transition in the cases you don't want people to use it.  You probably need an app to provide a suitable condition for your case (the ones built into Jira are mostly about user permissions or groups).  Also consider protecting the "needs approval" transition with the inverse of the main condition so people don't get offered that when they don't need it.

[edwin vasquez]

This perhaps? 
https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Core-questions/How-to-hide-a-custom-field-based-on-workflow-status-in-jira/qaq-p/746846