What are these parenthetical numbers following a status?

[Jason Hayman]

I'm working with the new automations tool, but this question is not about that - at least not directly. When choosing a status, I see about 10 lines for "Done" each with their own unique number in parenthesis. Seems like an ID#, but for what? And how do I find its origin? And... (other questions)

Thanks!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Your instincts are spot on - the numbers are the unique ID in the database.  They don't have a lot of functionality beyond providing uniqueness.

[Jason Hayman]

Thanks @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- 

Why are there so many? Where do they come from?

My concern is one references Done in one project while another referenced Done in a different project. If so, when I choose one of these in the automation rule and try to apply that rule to all projects it won't work b/c the specific "done" I chose is good for only one (or some) but not all projects.

Do you have any insight into this?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Atlassian has a bit of a problem with flexibility.

Jira originally aimed itself at organisations that want to work in similar ways, so we got "schemes".  Project configuration settings that were shared.  A lot of larger organisations want this sort of thing.  But a lot of us also want the flexibility to do it our way, so Atlassian layered "create independent schemes for each project"

This does give us a system that is flexible from almost one end of the scale to the other (one end is "organisation dictates all the settings", the other "do what you want, it won't affect others")

But it also gives us admins problems.  You've got 7 done status on your list, of which I'd say the 10002 is the generally shared one that comes "off the shelf" and the other 6 created by people creating projects with independent workflows.

The good news is that these status are totally independent.  The bad news is that you'll need to account for all of them in your automations (and reporting).

As someone in the middle of the scale, I would recommend regular audits of fields and workflows, with a move to stamp down on all the people using status (and fields) that do the same thing, getting them all to share common objects.  Jira makes this hard, by making it easy to neglect it, but when I'm doing basic admin, I get the odd "please create project" which I do, and then I go edit the workflows and fields so that they reuse the common ones where possible.

[Jason Hayman]

This makes complete sense. Thank you.

[Daniel Fietta]

I assume you use several next-gen projects?

With classic projects, you can reuse statuses, so the Done status should only be available once in your system.

Next-gen projects do not use a shared configuration, so each workflow and status is only used for one project. So you end up multiple times with the same status in the projects, but in the database, they have different IDs as they are unique in each project.

This problem might already be fixed for the JQL search. However, automation rules, dashboards, filters, etc. are global features that pull the statuses from the DB and they do not check if the name is the same. They just show you all the available values.

So the reason for your concern is correct. We would need some feedback from Atlassian on how this problem is being worked on for automation rules.

Also, see bug reports (didn't find all of the related issues, I think I have already seen more related to this problem):

• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-72282
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-18116

Cheers,
Dan
STAGIL 

[Jason Hayman]

Thanks, @Daniel Fietta While we do not use next-gen, rather classic only (besides the odd test here or there), you explanation still helps frame the situation Atlassian gives us.