What does a number in brackets after a workflow status mean?

[Morgan Thunder]

I changed all of my statuses to 'Allow all statuses to transition to this one' and now I have (2) beside a lot of statuses. Always (2), regardless of what step in the workflow it is...Doesn't seem to make sense!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You are mixing up steps and transitions. The transitions are showing a (2) to say "this is only one transition". It has many starting points (i.e. all steps), and one end point. If you change it, you are changing a single transition - the one with an id of 2.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Sorry, I wanted to say "and steps have their own unique ids". They're separate things.

[Morgan Thunder]

Thank you for your answer. I'm a bit confused by your line: 'The transitions are showing a (2) to say "this is only one transition".' A '2' to say 'one transition????'. Is 'this is one transition' not a normal state of affairs when choosing a status to transition to? Why mark it with a '2'? And why was the 2 not there before? Also, just to clarify - is a step basically a status? Apologies for my confusion!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Nope, I usually manage to explain this very badly. A step is not quite a status, but there is a 1:1 relationship and for the most part, you can think of them as being the same. The steps are the skeleton of the workflow, and you have to give each step a single unique status. The status is what the users see, steps only matter to people editing the workflow. The main thing this allows is to be able to change status without ripping apart a whole workflow - if you for example used the status "did it" for step 19 in the flow, you can simply change it to status "done" for step 19 without having to do much surgery. The step doesn't change, but the status does. Anyway, back to transitions. A transition is a move from one step to another. Each transition has a single unique ID (i.e. 2). You can reuse transitions and if you do that, there is still only one transition in the workflow, you've just used it more than once. If you have a bit of workflow where you want to allow this: Open -> Resolved In Progress -> Resolved Then you could do it in two ways: Two transitions: Open -> <transition 7> -> Resolved In Progress -> <transition 22> -> Resolved One shared transition Open -> <transition 7> -> Resolved In Progress -> <transition 7> -> Resolved In the second case, the important thing is that if you change transition 7, it is a global change because there's only one transition there. If you need those two transitions to do different things, you need to go back to case 1, with separate transitions.

[Morgan Thunder]

Thank you for taking the time to give me a detailed explanation! So as I understand it, although you describe a transition as 'a move from one step to another' , it is really only concerned with the destination 'step'. That is, if Open->Resolved can be the same transition as In Progress->Resolved it seems safe to conclude that transitions are independent from the statuses they operate on and only dependent on what they transition to. I re-iterate this just in case I'm wrong! If I'm right, carry on and thank you for your help!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It's not quite the way I think of it, but it's close enough. A transition is pretty much independent of its starting point. Ok, they need them as a hanging point ("create" being a special case), but they don't really care if they're used from multiple places. Conditions and validators could care about the start point, but it's rare that they'd use the status information alone (if you don't want a transition available from X to Y, then don't add it to step X)

[Jonas Andersson]

Its the transition step number. I use it to identify what transitions might have updated a ticket on advanced workflows. If you hover a transition link in a workflow, you will see the same numbers as you can see when you view all transitions on a ticket.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Please be careful with language on this one - there's no such thing as a "transition step number", and it's confusing to say that. There are steps (which have an id) and transitions (which have their own ids). The two things are totally different concepts and hence are totally separate items in the workflow.

[Grace Ndefo]

Hi, 

The (2) might have been added automatically to the transition name because that transition had a duplicate in the workflow.

This can be changed by simply editing the trasiton name. 

Best regards,

Grace