What is the best way to retire an issue type from an active project?

[esinclair]

We have issue types we no longer need to use in active projects and would like to remove them from the Create Issue options while maintaining historical data in the project.  What is the best way to stop users from creating new issues in this issue type while still using the project for other issue types?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

There's no "retire" function. 

You'll be able to find some stuff about playing javascript tricks to remove it from certain screens, but there's plenty of ways around those tricks (using REST, changing the issue type later, or other create methods provided by addons)

Your only real options are to rename it to something to discourage users using it, move the issues out to another archive type project and remove the issue type from the project's issue type scheme, or put in validators that can't be passed.

[esinclair]

Thanks! We have used the rename trick as well.

[Sten Sundelin]

We have added a validation rather than post-function, but that has the same problem that the user is not informed until after they have already entered (potentially a lot of) data.

Here's another option discussed:

https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/17901678

[esinclair]

Thank you!

[Deniz Oğuz - The Starware]

You can create a new workflow only associated with that project and add a post function to create transition that will cause operation to fail. You can return an error message that explains issue type is not valid for this project anymore.

[esinclair]

Thanks for your answer!

[MattS]

post function or validator?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You could use either, but a post-function won't give a message back to the user and it's quite hard to make one actually stop the transition. You need to deliberately code something that will crash rather than just fail - things like trying to update non-existent fields will just fail and carry on, rather than blocking the transition (You can tell I've been here before, right? ;-) )

[esinclair]

Thank you everyone.  The way we have managed this scenario to date is to rename the issue type as noted by Nic.  Then we add a message to the create screen with info about the retirement and remove all other fields.  We leave one of the removed fields as required so users are unable to complete the create function.

I was hoping there might be a better way now that we were unaware of. 

Thank you all for your suggestions.