Introduction

Sometimes one wishes an issue to pass through a set of transitions, but the order in which they are run does not matter. For example, if an issue must be approved by 3 different managers, the order usually doesn't matter.

JIRA uses the OSWorkflow library to manage transitions. OSWorkflow is technically capable of handling our situation, through its mechanism of splits and joins. Although JIRA's workflow editor is not capable of adding splits and joins, they can be added by hand to the workflow definition, in XML form, and this modified workflow loaded back into JIRA.

This page describes how to implement a simple split where 3 managers are required to approve an issue before it can be worked on:

           /--> Manager1 Approves -\
          /                         \
(Create) -+---> Manager2 Approves ------> Open --> In Progress -> ...
          \                         /
           \--> Manager3 Approves  /

Try this at your own risk. JIRA does not 'know' about OSWorkflow splits and joins, and use of them will break parts of JIRA. Specifically: Don't try to edit a splits-and-joins workflow in the workflow editor. It is not possible to Bulk Transition an issue through a split/join workflow transition. Attempting to do so may break your issues. The workflow editor shows broken image icons for such transitions, so hopefully this is enough of a hint not to proceed. Changing workflows appears to work, if the destination workflow defines a step for the "Pending Approval" status. However, it is a good idea to back up the database before changing workflows in production, as this may break in future. Overall, you should only attempt to do this if you are happy to fix broken issues in the database if it all goes wrong. The relevant relations are described in the database schema documentation.

Create an interim template workflow

First, create a workflow that is as close as possible to what we want. You probably already have a workflow, and want to add an approval step at some point. For this example, we take the default JIRA workflow.

Add new statuses

We wish 3 managers to approve our issue. We need a "Pending Approval" state for issues being approved. Create two other temporary statuses too:

Create new workflow

Copy the workflow you wish to add approvals to. Call it "Interim Approval Workflow" or somesuch, since we will not actually be using it in this form.

Now edit the interim workflow. Add new approval steps, each linked to one of the new statuses. Also add a transition to each to the step you wish the approval to end with. In our case, we want approved issues to be Open.

You probably want each approval step to be restricted to a certain group, so add a Condition to each step to meet your requirements.

The end result of all this editing will look like this:

Edit the workflow XML.

Return to the page listing the workflows, and click 'XML' to get a copy of the interim workflow's XML. Save this to disk.

We now need to edit the workflow XML by hand, to:

• Modify the transition that creates the issue, to split the issue into our 3 new steps.
• Modify our 3 steps so that their "ManagerX Approves" transition invoke a join (undoing the split).
• Modify our 3 steps to refer to the same status ("Pending Approval")

Adding a split

Open up the workflow XML in a text editor. At the end, before the closing </workflow> add the split definition:

Here we've defined a 'split' that results in 3 steps.

Now modify the transition where we want to invoke the split. In our case, we want to split immediately the issue is created, so we go to the 'initial' action, and change:

to:

ie. instead of resulting in step 1 ("Open") we result in split 1.

The step IDs in the join definition (7, 8, 9) should refer to the 3 steps we created:

The join is evaluated whenever an approval step is evaluated.

Adding a join

Similarly, add the join definition at the end of the file, before the </workflow>:

Again, make sure that the steps referenced (7, 8, 9) refer to the right steps.

We want this join to be invoked whenever a "ManagerX Approves" transition is run. So go to each approval step and modify the transition's unconditional result, eg. from:

to:

Note: we changed old-status to Finished, deleted the status attribute and replaced step="1" with join="1".

Do the same for Pending Manager2 Approval and Pending Manager3 Approval.

Make approval steps refer to same status.

We want all three approval steps (edited above) to refer to the Pending Approval state. Change:

to:

and:

to:

Import the edited XML

Now import the XML from the JIRA workflow editor. When importing, we've called it "Approval Workflow":

Clicking on it, it should look like this:

Apply new workflow

Now create a workflow scheme:

and associate it with a project.

Now try creating an issue. Immediately after creation, you should see 3 transitions available (depending on the conditions you placed on the steps):

Clicking on any 'Approve' transition will 'remove' it:

and after the last approval, the issue progresses to the 'Open' state:

Other Resources

• User discussion on Old Nabble
• JIRA Workflow Designer example of 3 People Approval Workflow