How do transition IDs work?

[Markus]

If i create a new workflow are the Transition IDs unique for this workflow or is the connection between Statuses general for your JIRA?

Like i have the transition Open->In Progress with the transition ID 55 in one workflow, will this transitionID be the same in another workflow with the transition Open-> In Progress or will it get another transitionID?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Transition IDs are locally unique, and nothing to do with the status or steps they move you between.

If you create a workflow via project creation, you'll find each workflow has the same id for the transitions.  But if you create the workflow by hand, even if it's identical, you will find the transitions have different ids, mostly determined by the order in which you added them.

Your transition 55 will be the same in copied workflows, and workflows you create using the same template.  But once you start editing the workflows, it might not be the same.  It might be the same in other workflows, but is more likely to be different or not even exist.

[Markus]

Thanks!

This is kinda bad because we need to calculate benchmarks inside JIRA. We have multiple fields that grab transition dates and the fields are using the IDs of the transitions.

Either we use the same workflow for all the projects or we have to configure the fields for each and every single project, correct?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, that's correct.

There's no way for Jira to know that two transitions should be considered the same, that would stop us from having editable workflows completely.  So you'll need to deal with it either in your code or configuration (I'm guessing you're using scripted or calculated fields to capture it), or by using a fixed known workflow for everything.

[Markus]

Thats one of the annyoing things about JIRA: Jira stores the transition history for each and every single Issue but its not possible to access this information directly (via JQL for example). 

But thanks i will need to talk with some teams now^^

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I've always built off the issue history to be honest, using "status was X, changed to Y" read out of the change history.  But yes, with code, not JQL.