what would cause an issue on an Agile board to not have a record in the ISSUERANKING table?

[Akshatha Sriram]

Noticed that a couple of issues do not show up in the ISSUERANKING table contains one (and only one) record for each issue that appears on any Agile board within Jira, and contains a field indicating that issue’s direct ordinal child issue ID. 

Various theories could be if the issue is removed from JIRA or present across boards then this could lead to conflicts and hence resulting in an issue not being mapped to a rank.The remove scenario makes sense, but the issue being present across multiple boards should be a common scenario. Would like to know what is exactly happening.

[Boris Berenberg]

This is the old ranking method. Newer versions of the plugin now use LexoRank where the data is stored differently.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Ahh, so an upgrade would move to the new method, and leave historical (and redundant) data in the issueranking table. Another way to get an empty ranking. Thanks Boris!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Oops, that comment could be read as being sarcastic. It is not meant that way, it was a follow up to my answer (now converted to a comment) that suggested that there are several ways to get an empty line in that table. Most importantly, I mean to thank Boris for the *right* answer.

[Boris Berenberg]

Lol no worries. <3

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I do understand what you're trying to do here, but I'm afraid you have gone down a route which is totally unsuitable. Reading a database which can (and does) change without consultation and warning is *never* going to be the right approach to anything you're trying to do. Please, stop looking at the database. Either use Jira as it's intended, and use the remote api (REST) to read the data when you;re trying to automate stuff. Forget lexorank, issueranking, jiraissue, banananana, it's wasting untold amounts of your time. Use the UI or REST. Ignore people who tell you to use the database, because they are almost certainly wrong.

[Boris Berenberg]

I really do agree with Nic, relying on DB consistency from us is a bad bet. If Nic's suggestion to use REST is not sufficient, consider creating a plugin for JIRA which exposes the data you need by getting it via JIRA's Java api. https://developer.atlassian.com/display/JIRADEV/JIRA+Agile+Development If you do not have the expertise to do this, there is a community of experts which can be found at: https://www.atlassian.com/resources/experts that do this kind of custom work.

[Akshatha Sriram]

I actually realized i can just apply order by clause/sort on the lexorank field for a particular issuetype of items to get the order in which they appear in that issuetype stack in JIRA UI.

[Akshatha Sriram]

Thanks for the response guys i have been looking at the wrong table all the while i realize. Will have to come up with a method to decode the Lexorank table now. I am glad i consulted here before moving any further.

[MattS]

Occasionally I see issues with no lexorank. If you search for that issue using some other field it doesn't show up in the search. Which suggests it got created but not indexed. This can happen if you Create transition uses a custom event so add an explicit Index post function you your workflow. I'm not sure what else can cause this but it goes away once the issue is edited in anyway

[MattS]

Sorry for the mangled text but the mobile view of this site doesn't let me edit

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

If an issue is removed from Jira, it is gone, dead, ended, there's nothing left, so you wouldn't need an entry for it (and the entry in that table should be removed).  

An issue being present in many boards really doesn't matter - the point of ranking is that it is a relative score, not an absolute score - you need to be able to say "this issue is higher or lower" than any other issue you choose to compare it with, but the actual number is irrelevant.

The ways I can imagine you'd get an empty ranking are:

• Broken plugin
• Accidental data corruption
• Dodgy script
• Ranking field does not apply to this project/issuetype
• Multiple ranking fields in use and this one not relevant to this issue

I have seen all of those affect ranking, although I have never actually looked into the issueranking table to see how it works.  Also, my experience with it may well not be complete, there could be other reasons.

One other thought though:  If ranking is working for you, then the values in the database probably aren't of much real use, which leads me to wonder why you want to know?