Workflow update - Status Property change not retroactive for approvals?

[Rosa M Fossi]

Hello Community,

I was asked to update the Approvers requirement from "ALL" approvals to just 1 approval.  

I made the necessary change in the status properties (this is an older service desk and the easy GUI not available), and published; however, all the tickets requiring approvals still show that all approvers are needed.  Is the change not retroactive for tickets that were sitting in "Needs Approval" status?

[Alexander Bondarev · Accepted solution]

Hi, @Rosa M Fossi !

It seems logic, because before were another conditions on transition. 

Now you just change conditions - but didn't transitioned issues. 

Look throught "Bulk-change" transitioning.

[Rosa M Fossi]

Thanks @Alexander Bondarev

I also dealt with Atlassian support and they explained the same... here is the official response in the event anyone is interested:

Thanks for reaching out to Atlassian Support.

That's correct, the workflow change is not retroactive so issues created when 2 approvals were required will still need the 2 approvals even after the property being updated to only 1 approval required. New tickets will require only 1 approver.

The solution, in this case, would be to filter these requests, add yourself (or another user) as approver and approve them, so the tickets will have the extra approval needed. If there is a big number of tickets that need this extra approval, it can be done performing a bulk operation.

[Louis Seefried]

How did you add yourself or someone else as an approver to the existing tickets? Have a similar issue but I am not sure how to add a new approver to the existing tickets or resubmit to the beginning of the workflow to get the new settings.

[Rosa M Fossi]

@Louis Seefried  Welcome Louis!     We'll need a little more info to assist with this...  But I'll provide a couple of bullet points that might help:

• The issue you're in must be associated with a workflow that has approval logic. After being created, they land in "Waiting for Approval" Status.
  • In the Service Desk (Service Management) projects, there is an issuetype called Service Request with Approvals that has this logic built in.
• If your issue is indeed that issue type, or if you have your own type / workflow configuration with this logic built in, you should see "Add approver" on the top right.  
  • Or if an approver has already been added, look for the "Approvers" field on the right side panel and you can click it and add the user there.

[Rosa M Fossi]

A couple of screenshot to help   :) 

IssueType Service Request with Approvals icon:

top right Add Approver alert: 

[Louis Seefried]

Your solution might allow me to add new approvers to the status but this would not help with adding approvers to tickets that already have the existing approval list assigned. How would I add a new approver to an existing ticket in the "Waiting for Approval" status (as i can use that process for the peer review status as well).

My issue was not related to the Waiting for Approval state but for a Peer Review state that was manually created.

We have multiple tickets that are in the Peer Review state but, because of changes associated with approvers in the workflow, they have different peer reviewers assigned depending upon when they were placed in the Peer Review state.

I would like to be able to locate all of the issues that are in the Peer Review state and then add a new list of people that can perform the Peer Review to clear of the backlog.