Making a field mandatory if a drop down field has value "Yes"

[tony.gonzalez]

Hello,

I have a drop down type of field named "Are there any lessons learnt?" with values Yes and No. I have a paragraph field below it called "Lessons Learnt". I would like that if the user chooses "Yes" on the drop down "Are there any lessons learnt" he is forced to to write something on the "Lessons Learnt" paragraph before moving to the next column. Is this possible to do either on the workflow or via automation?

I am using company-managed business project and I don't have any app.

[Alexander Hohmann · Accepted solution]

Are you ready for a solution that is a bit 'dirty' and a bit 'out of the box', I am afraid?

1. When the "Are there any lessons learnt?" field is changed, that could trigger an automation rule that does the following. If "yes" is entered, nothing happens. It "no" is chosen, then the rule enters some text into the "Lessons Learnt" field, e.g. "None."

2. To the next status transition, you add a validator that makes "Lessons Learnt" a mandatory field that may not be empty. When it is, the validator displays an error message like "The Lessons Learnt field may not be empty."

Since the "Lessons Learnt" field contains a value ("None.") when "No" has been chosen in "Are there any lessons learnt?" and has remained empty when "Yes" has been chosen, the validator should stop the transition according to your needs.

To encourage users, you could even have the transition display a custom screen that contains only these two fields.

Among the reasons this is quite dirty: If somebody has already made an entry into "Lessons Learnt" and later somebody chooses "No" for "Are there any lessons learnt?", then that will overwrite the previous entry. And you cannot be sure the field is empty even if "Yes" has been chosen. So this will work often, but not always.

As an alternative, you could also use an automation rule that runs every day or night for example, checks for all open work items (or those in a certain status) whether the two fields match, and sends a notification or e-mail to owners. Since they will now receive these annoying daily reminders, users might eventually bring themselves to do what needs to be done. The rule could even be so stubborn as to return the work item into the previous status each time. That might draw some user attention.

(P.S.: It should be called "lesseons learned", not "learnt", but that might pass as splitting hairs.)

[tony.gonzalez]

Excellent Alexander; I am a stickler for grammar so I accept your correction...

And I really like your workaround; not sure if I will use it in my board but it is good to learn these workarounds.

[Mohamed Benziane · Accepted solution]

Hi,

This is not possible out of the box, you will need some plugin like Scriptrunner

[tony.gonzalez]

Thanks Mohamed

[Marcel Hager]

As usual, features that should be there out of the box require janky 3rd party tools to do something that should be simple.

[Maciej Dudziak _Forgappify_]

Hi @tony.gonzalez 

The described case can be addressed using any Jira expression-based validator available on the Atlassian marketplace.

I am from Forgappify, and we developed Jira Expression Validator, which is part of the Workflow Building Blocks for Jira app. Because the second field in your case is a paragraph, the expression will be a little more complex than usual. If you are not familiar with Jira expressions, we have created Ultimate Validator, which you can set up using UI. I have created an article about if you are interested: 

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/App-Central-articles/Ultimate-Condition-and-Validator-A-Smarter-Way-to-Build-Jira/ba-p/2943075

I hope it will help

Cheers