How do I grant Members read access to Workflow rules?

[James Gatter]

Hi,

I want to give my project's Members access to see the workflow transition rules or receive an explanation to understand why they cannot transition an issue. I don't want to give my users the administrator role since it might allow them to subvert the rules. I also would prefer not to document this externally since the rules may change over time. Is there no permission grantable for read-only access to workflow transition rules?

This is essentially the same question as this two-year old question

Hoping there's a solution in 2023.

[Els Bassant]

Hi James, 

Unfortunately it is not possible to give regular users or project admins permissions to view the details of workflow transitions.

Some validators allow setting a specific error message when the conditions are not met, which may help with clearing some confusion. 

[James Gatter]

Thank you Els. I'm not familiar with validators. Are they easy to integrate? Do the error messages appear in the UI or is this something specific to the APIs?

[Els Bassant]

Validators are configured in the advanced setting of a workflow and check whether a transition meets certain requirements. More info here.

For example you can check whether specific fields have a value, and if if they don't then the transition fails. Some of these allow you to set custom errorr messages as well, such as "please provide a value for field X". The error message shows up in UI.

But if you were unfamiliar with validators it sounds like you aren't using any. What are you using to limit who can transition issues? Conditions?

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @James Gatter ,

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Actually your question is not the same as the post your referenced. That post is asking about allowing users to see all the Automation Rules that have been created for a project. That is entirely different than what you asked about - allowing the users to see Workflow Transition information.

There is an open change request from 2014 asking for the ability to let non-admins have read-only access to the details of workflow transitions:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-40639

It has very few votes so is unlikely to get on the roadmap. The original change request for the same thing in Jira Server was already closed as "Won't Do".

[James Gatter]

Thank you for the reply. Ah yes it seems I confused Automation and Workflow rules.

Would you have any advice for a workaround? Any way to make error messages appear when they cannot transition a ticket?

[Trudy Claspill]

Are you talking about transitions that they do have access to try that then fail to complete?

Example: They have an issue set to In Progress. They have an option to set it to Done. They are able to select that, but for some reason the issue doesn't get set to Done.

Or are you talking about a transition that they are unable to make?

Example 1: They have an issue set to In Progress. When they pull down the Status button they don't see "Done" as an option.

Example 2: On a board they try to drag a card from one column to another, but when the try to drop it on the destination it immediately snaps back to the source column.

If you are talking about the case where they can select the destination status, but the issue doesn't get set to that status, that should be able to handled with Validators as @Els Bassant suggests.

If you are talking about the Case where they can't select the status at all, or the card snaps back when trying to drag it to a new column on a board, that is either a Condition on the workflow or there simply is not a direct transition from the source status to the destination status. If there is not a direct transition available that would be discernible by viewing the workflow diagram. If there is a Condition preventing the transition, there is no native method to make that information available to end users.