Is there a way to restart unique numbering in a project when existing tickets have been deleted?

[Anita Keeler]

I have a project for Change Requests that relies on the unique reference number being the same as the legal document - someone accidentally added a bunch of records into this project interrupting the sequence. deleting the records did not return the missing numbers and there appears to be no way to restart the sequence even by changing the project key and starting from zero records.  

If anyone can help I would be most grateful.  

[Jakob KN · Accepted solution]

Hi Anita, 

To my knowledge, there is no way of reusing ID's from deleted issues from the Admin interface.
The only option there might be, could possibly be in relation to the counter on the server-side of your instance, as discussed here:
https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Does-Jira-reuse-issue-numbers-from-deleted-issues/qaq-p/198927

However the label suggests you're on cloud, so this would not be an option for you.

If we know more about the case, perhaps there's something else that can be done so you won't rely on matching numbers in the issue ID's. 

What is the reason that the Change Requests and Legal Document have to have the same ID-number?

[Anita Keeler]

Many thanks for your answer Jakob,

I guessed as much about re-using issue IDs.  I did try to change the Project ID in the hope that it would restart the numbering sequence but to no avail.  You are correct that we are in the cloud version so no real opportunity to restart from the server side.  

In terms of making the numbers add up there is not really a problem other than it looks a bit odd - we are combining CRs from 2 sources (one share point list and one pre-existing Jira project that had not been particularly well used).  We wanted to keep the CRs themselves numbered in sequence so our respective accounting departments could keep in synch with the budget usage associated with each one.  Having successfully avoided using the same number twice it was a little disappointing to have to start in a shiny new project with Jira issue number CR-10 being associated to legal document number CR0018.   I bit the bullet and created a field called 'Original CR Reference' and typed in the original number.  I guess it would be nice to be able to reset the counter in future versions, in case someone else does something silly like I did.

Kind regards

Anita