Automation for Jira: "Tried to update an entity that does not exist."

[Erik Buchholz]

We have a rule with scheduled trigger that searches issues of type message in status open that have a link.

These messages will be transitioned and a branch for the linked issues is opened.

With some conditions the linked issues will be transitioned too. With some further conditions in a second step a date value is set.

If more than one message is linked to one issue, we have this issue more than one time in the branch and therefore the rule tries to transition the issue more than once. One of the conditions checks for the status, but the issues seams not to be handled serialized and we get the following error.

Error marking step #268311 finished: root cause: Tried to update an entity that does not exist.

How do we avoid this error?

Is the bulk handling option for the trigger or the branch useful in this case?

I found that in this case the audit log only holds information about one issue instead of all. This makes troubleshooting more difficult.

Is it an option to provide a transition from the destination status to itself?

Update

I activated the bulk handling options, but it makes no difference.

I found another rule that gives the same error under different circumstances.

• Trigger: Update issue
• Condition
• Branch: Linked issues
• Condition
• Transition
• Publish event: Update issue

I get the error mainly if more than one issue gets inside the branch but sometimes also if it's only one.

With that information I don't believe that an additional transition will help.

I assume that it could help to combine the transition and the last step.

In this last step I set MyCustomDate to the value of the trigger issue if that is newer. Currently I use a JQL condition

MyCustomDate < {{triggerissue.MyCustomDate}}

But how can I combine this condition inside the transition?

• If else branches are not possible inside a related issues branch
• The smart value if function only works with numbers
  {{#=}}IF(condition,then,else){{/}}
• I found no way to access the values from trigger issue with scriptrunner action