Reversing an Archived Issue

[Liz]

We had a bunch of old issues in Jira, which we went through and archived. We didn't follow the workflow and went straight to archive for the old issues. 

We now can't get rid of them out of our active issues log. We read that it was due to going straight to archive, and not following the proper workflow. But, now we don't know how to reverse it to correct the issue. We want to change the issue back to active and then archive the issue properly, so it disappears from active issues list.

Any ideas?

[Thomas Schlegel]

Hi Elizabeth,

what did you do to archive the issues? There's no archiving function in Jira, as far as I know. You can archive a released version and that includes archiving the issues in that. Is that what you have done?

[Liz]

Hi Thomas, 

I literally went from In Progress or Waiting on old issues and went straight to Archived. We didn't set up the workflows in Jira, another company did, so I'm not entirely sure how these were set up.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Ok, to get an issue out of your "archived" status, you need to have a transition out of it in the workflow, and have permission to use it.  It's hard to see from that diagram if there is an outgoing transition.

You'll need to get one of your administrators to edit the workflow - first to see if there is a transition (and then add one if there isn't) and then to check the conditions on it it and ensure you match them.

[Thomas Schlegel]

Hi Elizabeth,

it seems, that your workflow has a "Dead End" in the Archived state. There's no transition going out of the state "Archived".

The cause, why your issues are still active in your views is, that they have no resolution set.

So, I would do it like that:

• Edit this workflow
• Add a new transition from Archived to Archived, name it "set resolution"
• in this transition, add a workflow post function that sets the resolution to a resolution of your choice
• save the workflow

This should result in a new transition for your "dead end issues" that simply adds a resolution, so they disappear from your active isuues list.

[Liz]

Thanks Nic. There wasn't a transition built in. I have admin access for the workflow, so I can build in the transition. I was speaking to someone in the office about how to build in a transition and we have an error saying we're editing a draft workflow. We've published it, it confirms it's published and then still doesn't let us save a transition

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Ah, that old chestnut.

There's a horrid bug in JIRA that hasn't been stomped on for years.  When you have a step with no outgoing transitions, you can't add one while it draft mode.

You will need to copy the workflow.  Edit the copy, adding the transition, then create a new workflow-scheme (I would copy the existing one for the project).  This new scheme should use your new workflow.  Then apply the new scheme to the project.

[Liz]

Thanks Nic/Thomas - I've built in the transition to a copied version of the workflow. How do I publish the copy version to overwrite the original? It's not coming up as a draft version. When I click out of the copy I can't see where it goes?

[Thomas Schlegel]

You have to exchange the old version of the workflow with the new version of the workflow in the workflow scheme, your project is using.

[Liz]

Done. Thanks Thomas. That's corrected my issue now :) Thanks Guys!

[Thomas Schlegel]

you're welcome :-)

[Andrew Saxsma]

This solved my problem also.  Thank you!  Can we get this bug fixed?  I see the comment from scholar web services below, but I don't think I understand the rational for that constraint.  Seems more like a bug.

[Andrew Saxsma]

Hey Nic, is there a "Feature Request" open for the issue you mentioned on June 26, 2018?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Somewhere, but I don't have it bookmarked.  It affects only admins who have inherited systems where previous admins were unaware of the bug, there's a relatively easy fix, it's actually a lot of work to fix, and Cloud is moving away from workflow editing in this way anyway.  So it's very far down in Atlassian's priorities.

[Liz]

Also, just found this - Point 3 of the bullet. This sounds like you can't add in a transition in an active workflow and I tried to save a transition to a draft workflow and it says I can't save it to a draft one either....I am new to Jira, so apologies if I'm missing something obvious!

• If a status has no outgoing transitions (Global transitions are not considered), it cannot have any new outgoing transitions added, regular or global.