How to turn OFF 'Allow unassigned issues'?

[Shun Hirayanagi]

The option 'Allow unassigned issues' in General Configuration is currently on. We would like to turn it off, but we cannot do it as the following URL shows.
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-22527

We should leave unassigned issues which were created before. We would like to refuse unassigned issues from now on.

Do you have any ideas or suggestions to turn it off without changing unassigned issues we already have?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Simple answer - you can't.

You must assign all the unassigned issues before you can turn the option off.

You might think "I can flip the flag in SQL", and it might work, but when I tried it a while ago, it caused huge problems - any attempt to edit or update unassigned issues caused Jira to crash. This was in Jira 4 though, it may be that later versions handle it better, like the mandatory field flag - you'll just get a "you must fill in assignee" on any edit or update. But you really need to test that in a test system before you attempt it in production.

[Shun Hirayanagi]

Thank you for your comment. I was just thinking of trying a way via SQL. We can avoid huge problems.

Although we uses Jira 5, we have to test it quite carefully as you mentioned. It's tough work, so we decided to keep the option ON. We will consider a another way to prohibit unassigned issues, such as validators of workflow.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Ok, you could simply change your "field configurations", flagging assignee as mandatory in all of them. You'll still have the problem that you won't be able to edit or progress old issues without assigning them, but forcing people to think about it as they change them might be appropriate anyway! (And this won't crash or anything)

[Peter Van de Voorde]

You could just create an internal user called "unassigned" and assign all the old tickets to this user.

Then it's still clear which are the older "unassigned" issues.

Best regards,

Peter

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yup, that's what the docs say to do. I think the questioner wants to skip that.

Of course, if you create an unassigned user, you might as well leave the option enabled - the dummy user subtly distorts your reporting and I find some users find it confusing.

[Shun Hirayanagi]

Thank you for your comment. Yes, we would like to skip that.

The first reason is that I don't have the edit permission for all of Jira tickets. We have so many permission schemes and issues security schemes that we cannot change all of them.
The second reason is that notification mail will be sent if I change assignee. That might confuse our customers.