How do I know what affect changing a workflow transition condition has?

[John Hutchinson]

I copied a workflow and then began working on changing the conditions for transitions - adding 1 more condition to some transitions.  (To only allow project admins to transition from a certain state.)  However pretty much all the other transitions also got this extra condition.  So it seems the conditions are shared but it isn't obvious which transitions share the same condition.

To make things works worse, the workflow I copied from was modified as well!  I never published the copied workflow changes but my production conditions were not edited.  So I had to manually go through in numerous locations in the original workflow and delete the extra condition.

Do I have to create a new workflow from scratch to make sure I don't affect existing workflows?  What is the point of the copy workflow feature?

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi John,

Something does not add up about what you have described so far.  If you created a copy of an existing workflow, then this copy won't be assigned to any projects yet.  Creating a copy of a workflow this way is always going to be an inactive workflow.  These can be edited directly without the need to publish in order to make the changes official.  But in order to then use that workflow, you have to assign it to specific issues in a specific project. Steps do to that are in Associating a workflow scheme with a project.

However in active workflows, changes made to a transition such as a post function or a new condition do require you to publish that workflow again in order for those changes to take affect.

What many Jira admins tend to overlook when making a change like this is the understanding that active workflows can be shared amongst multiple projects at the same time.  So making a change in one workflow can affect multiple projects that use that specific workflow, but it won't change other independent workflows, even if those workflows utilize the same transition names / number. 

And the changes made here in one location can be undone again in the same method.  I'm not sure I follow why you would have been able to make a change in one location, and then have to jump through hoops to undo that change in multiple different locations. That sounds extremely unfriendly way to manage workflows. The workflows don't operate that way in my experience.

Something profound just occurred to me writing this.

Did you copy the workflow?  Or did you copy the Workflow Scheme?

I ask because, I can see a scenario where you might have copied the workflow scheme instead of the workflow itself, which would have just created an inactive workflow scheme, but not an inactive workflow itself.  And it would have been still linked to the actual workflow that was in production.  You still would have been prompted to publish changes to that workflow, being an active workflow, but it does at least explain a way that you might have believed you were creating a copy of the workflow itself when in fact you might have just copied the scheme that contains that workflow.

Does this help? Curious to learn more about your situation here.

Andy