is there is a way to link an instance of a workflow with one or more instances of another workflow

[John Rooney]

I need to have several workflows available within a single project. What I need to be able to do is associate instances of these workflows. For example, we have incident workflow and issues workflow. A single instance of a incident workflow maybe resolved with several issues workflow instances.

OK. I don't think I have explained myself properly. We want to use to two separate workflows; A ticketing workflow, and an issues workflow. The idea is that many user problems will be handled within the ticketing system, but some tickets will raise one or more issues. This work will be managed in the issue workflows. What I want to do is be able to establish a relationship between these workflows.

[Nicolas Bourdages]

If I understood correctly, you'd like your issue to get to a status like In Progress, and while In Progress, have it go through several iterations of a kind of "sub-workflow" because your original issues has... other implications that need to be resolved first?

On top of this not being possible in JIRA, this seems overly complicated. There has to be a better way.

Sounds like a job for subtasks. Or Linked Issues.

[Graham Meaden]

In an ITIL context one might have problems, incidents and change requests, each may have their own life cycle. Also Incidents may trigger (reporting of) one or more Problems and Problems may be resolved through one or more Change Requests.

Each Issue Type ( Incident, Problem, Change Request ) needs its own workflow scheme.

To enable meaningful linkage as described above, you will have to specify new types of Link in the admin pages.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That doesn't make a lot of sense, what does "link a workflow to another one" mean?

Anyway, you can have many workflows in a project.  The workflow scheme tells JIRA what workflow to use for a given issue type.

[John Rooney]

See update comments.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It's more clear, and the first part of it is definitely answered by "use the workflow schemes to define what workflow to use for each issue type", but it still doesn't really answer "the link (or relationship) to another one"? What do you actually want from that?

[John Rooney]

Hi, what I need to be able to to is to resolve one or more tickets with an issue. For example, a user reports a minor problem with a ticket (Application doesn't load). We realize this is due to a change in the Chrome NPAPI, this is now an issue, but we want to link the two together.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Well, first, you need to define the relationships in the system (it can't do anything if it doesn't know about the relationships). Jira has several ways to represent relationships, with the most obvious being "is a sub-task of", but the one you probably want to use for most stuff is "issue links" - you can define different types of these (and a number are provided off the shelf), they're directional so they can be made to describe relationships in human terms and properly (a massive weakness in a lot of other issue trackers), and the handling of them is quite logical and sane. Once you've done that, you'll need code to implement your business logic - e.g. "issue X closes, therefore any issues linked to it as 'duplicates of X' should also be closed". It's possible, especially if you have script runner, but there is no generic solution because the rules are completely arbitrary.