Unable to publish workflow draft

[Chris]

Hello, I'm attempting to publish a workflow draft, where I added an extra transition from DONE to an earlier status so that tasks can be moved back a step if need be.

When I try to publish the draft and overwrite the active workflow I recieve the following error:

"You are editing a draft workflow. The step 'DONE' has no outgoing transitions in the active workflow, so you cannot add any outgoing transitions in the Draft workflow"

I interpret this as "You can't publish this draft because it is different from the original", which is somewhat baffling, since it defeats the entire point of editing something.

Can someone help me understand why I'm unable to do this, and how I can publish the draft witout having to make a copy and reassociate the workflow with the project (if that's even an option)?

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

there are scenarios where you can’t edit and publish the workflow directly. What you need to do is make a copy of the workflow, edit it then go back to workflows and add the new workflow to your list in that project. Then associate the new workflow with the issue types you desire.

[Chris]

I was affraid of that, any idea why? This is rather impractical and I'm having trouble understanding this functionality.

[Jack Brickey]

There's a long-standing bug on the inability to add a transition to statuses that don’t have an outgoing transition already. I don’t recall the ticket on this but it is discussed in several threads in the Community.

[Chris]

Thank you very much. Though this does confirm my fears that I'll have to go "the long way around". Fingers crossed nothing breaks when I reassociate the workflow. Thanks again! I do hope this will get fixed soon.

[Maggie]

This is really impractical. Basically anytime when we make a change to workflow we would have to create a copy. Will this bug be resolved? Because then we create multiple numbers of inactive workflows...

[Antoine _Klee Group_]

Damn I got the same error just know, it never occured before.

What's the point of having an edit button if we can not edit the workflow without having to:

copy it with a different name → edit it → then edit the workflow scheme.

Not being able to remove statuses from active workflows on Cloud was already a joke but this is insane, not being able to add transitions to workflows!!

Like the only editable thing now is what, renaming the transition only?

[Sumit Ramteke]

• I came across same issue. But able to resolve this
• there might be several unpublished changes in draft mode
• due to which your new draft could not be publish (kind of bug)
• you just need to Discard draft 
• then View original 
• come again to edit mode
• apply your new changes and publish it
• and you are done

[acam]

I tried this several times, and does not work. 

[Sam Hudson]

Hi all,

For years my charity was using Jira Data Centre hosted on our own servers and I never had this issue.  In the last three months we migrated to Jira cloud and today I was updating a workflow and had this very same message. 

I see from other posts in the community this is not a new issue and the workaround to me is silly but I managed to find another way to get it done.  This might be known already but could not find anyone else saying they had done it this way in the other posts which are now closed for comments.

I will add that I think this will only work for Jira Cloud users as I do not remember seeing in the Data Centre version.

When you edit your workflow on the top right hand side of the edit area there is a toggle switch called "Switch editor".  Select that and from the drop down menu select "Open workflow in new editor".  The page will reload in the new editor and from here I was able to add a new transition and update the workflow with no errors.  In this editor I could not find any option to reuse a transition so had to create a new transition even though it was the same as another but it work fine for me.  Once done I went back to the project and viewed the workflow and the changes were there.

I hope this helps some people as the over workaround is time consuming and annoying and I cannot see Atlassian fixing it as its been around for years and no doubt the energy is being put into this new workflow editor.

With kind regards

Sam Hudson

[frankvdb]

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