Prevent transition if issue has sub-tasks / stories, and the sub-tasks / stories are not in-progress

[Steve Beauchamp]

Hi,

I am looking for a way to:

1. Prevent a Story from being transitioned from To-Do to In Progress manually if it has Sub-Tasks (this happens automatically with a post-function on the In Progress transition, which transitions the Sub-Task's parent issue)
2. Allow a Story to be transitioned manually from To-Do to In Progress if it has no Sub-Tasks

I have looked through the available conditions in my JIRA instance, and can't find anything out of the box that will help me, so I think I will have to script this in Groovy. 

Any ideas on the best way to approach this?

**UPDATE**

The original question didn't mention that I was looking for a way to handle this transition for Epics and Stories. 

@David Fischer provided a solution that works for both relationships, in the form of a workflow condition:

!issue.stories && !issues.subtasks

[David Fischer · Accepted solution]

For the first requirement, you shouldn't use a Validator but a Condition, because otherwise the post-function that automatically triggers the transition will make the user-triggered transition (the one on which the post-function resides) fail as well. This is a long standing Jira bug. 

For both requirements, you can use the JMWE app's "linked issues" condition and validator without any coding required. 

[Steve Beauchamp]

Hey @David Fischer

Thanks for your reply. The only JMWE linked issues condition I can find requires ALL Sub-Tasks to be in the specified status(es) before the transition can occur. This means that when the Story won't enter an "In Progress" state until all of the Sub-Tasks are in-progress.

What I'm hoping to do is:

If the Parent has Children:
Hide the transition from the user, and have it triggered by a post-function when one of the children enters the "In Progress" state. 

If the Parent does not have Children:
Allow the user to trigger the transition manually. 

[David Fischer]

You're right, your requirement is better served with a Scripted (Groovy) Condition with the following code:

!issue.get("subtasks")

However, this will also hide the transition from automated transitions, such as the Transition Parent Issue post-function you're probably using, so you'll also need to use the "Skip workflow conditions" option of that post-function.

[Steve Beauchamp]

Hi again,

I've tried what you suggested, but it's not really doing what I want it to do, as I want the script to work for all parent/children relationships (e.g. Epics that have Stories & Stories that have Sub-tasks).

The code I'm trying to play around with is this - which isn't working, for the same reason - is as follows:

if (issue.parent != null) false
if (issue.subtasks != null) false
else true

Also, the Transition Parent Issue post-function doesn't have a "skip workflow conditions" option. Perhaps that's in a recent version that I haven't upgraded to yet? 

[David Fischer]

You didn’t mention earlier that you want this to apply to Epics and Stories. This relationship is completely different from the issue/subtask relationship in Jira. In Jira, “parent” really only applies to subtasks. 

For example, the transition parent issue post-function will only apply to the parent/subtasks relationship. To transition the parent Epic of a Story, you need to use the Transition Linked Issues post-function with the “belongs to Epic” link type. 

Likewise, if you want to hide the Start Progress transition on an Epic when it has Stories, the code will be different:

!issue.stories

Finally, the option to ignore conditions and validators was added in JMWE 5.6.0. 

[Steve Beauchamp]

Hi @David Fischer,

This works perfectly, thanks!

My apologies for not specifying that this should apply to both Epics & Stories. I will mark this as 'solved' and update the description of my original question for anyone else that is looking to do the same thing. 

Thanks for the help! 

[Deleted user]

Hi @Steve Beauchamp,

You may consider any of the following two options :

• You can add a Conditioned validator (from Update on Transition for JIRA) that uses a JQL query to determine the condition to proceed. Here is a how-to: How to use JQL to create a validator
• Script Validator from Script runner for JIRA and use "Simple Script Validator" to validate if the parent has at least one sub-task. See the screenshot for reference.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

Swathi