Hi, great script here (SR + console) : https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Bulk-update-workflow-Issuetype-Screen-Scheme-for-multiple/qaq-p/2104218
for those like who were looking for a solution to this (requires the Scriptrunner addon tho).

Suggestion created 20 years ago. Suggestion refused 10 years later. Another 10 years later the problem still persists. That's the spirit of Atlassian team, where can I sign the contract?

There are tons of such issues opened all over the internet and there are scattered. For example this: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/JIRA-questions/Bulk-Change-Workflow-to-all-projects/qaq-p/108277 . They are always "rejected" by Atlassian and I have no clue why.

This is so important functionality especially if you have a lot of projects (1000+). How I am supposed to do a mass migration (if I need to)? By hand? Issue Type Schemes for example has such functionality and the "core idea" is there. All it needs is a GUI or "for all projects do...." like story.

I checked the REST APIs as well. Nothing is there. Is there any workaround on this matter?

If you change a workflow map in the middle of a project from 'Default' to a custom workflow, will it have a negative effect on the calls that exist in the project before you made that change? Will it delete them, for example?

jlee7 - your best bet is to write what your trying to do as a question on https://answers.atlassian.com. The community will be able to help you out and point you in the right direction.

jdevenny or anyone else – Can you point me in the right direction in getting Script Runner to make a bulk change? I have a similar situation as jhult

There's no native functionality to do that type of bulk change.

If you're running a self hosted instance of JIRA, I'd take a look at the Script Runner plugin.

Aha! I was trying to mass change the workflow schemes (to one workflow scheme) for projects which currently have different workflow schemes set. Is there a JIRA issue for this functionality?

Try doing this:

• Go to the workflow schemes page in global admin at [INSTANCE URL]/secure/admin/ViewWorkflowSchemes.jspa
• Click edit on the workflow scheme that you want to change
• Check that there is a green lozenge at the top of the page that says "Shared by X projects" (otherwise the scheme isn't shared**)
• Make changes to the workflow -> issue type associations
• When you click publish, you'll be taken through a migration wizard and the migration will be performed for all projects that use that scheme.

**In order to change it for multiple projects, you need to make sure that the scheme is actually used by multiple projects. In order to do this, go to each projects "Workflows" tab and select "Switch scheme". This will take you through a process of choosing a new scheme - make sure you choose the same scheme for the projects you want to share the scheme between. Once this is done, the above steps will work.

Josh

jdevenny,

Could you provide exact steps on how to bulk change the workflow scheme for multiple projects?

I read through the above Confluence documentation but am still missing something.

jhult - Look at the section "Configuring a workflow scheme outside of a project" on the following documentation page: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Configuring+Workflow+Schemes

Are there instructions? I can't seem to find how to do this (using 6.1-OD-04-1).

There is a solution from Catworkx..

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.catworkx.plugins.BulkWorkflowSchemeSwitcher

it works fine for me

Cheers
Thomas

Woohoo!

great

That is fantastic news! Thanks for letting us know Joshua.

That's great! We are looking foward to it. Thank you so much.

Wow, that's awesome

Hi Everyone,

Many thanks for your comments and votes over the years. I'm very happy to announce that this feature has been implemented and will be available in the upcoming JIRA 6.0. If you would like to try the feature out, take a look at our Early Access Program (EAP) release - we appreciate all of your feedback!

If you have any queries, please feel free to contact me directly.

Regards
Josh Devenny
Product Manager - JIRA

You can use JIRA CLI to change the workflow scheme of several JIRA Projects, as long as you do not need to remap statuses.

So it will work if:

• You are adding a transition to a workflow step that had no outbound transitions.
• You are adding a workflow step, while not removing any steps.

If you are removing a step, you are out of luck as far as readily available solutions go.

Here is a sample call to JIRA CLI for one project:

jira --action updateProject --project "PROJECTKEY" --workflowScheme "New Workflow Scheme"
OR
jira --action updateProject --project "PROJECTNAME" --workflowScheme "New Workflow Scheme"

JIRA CLI can also execute batch files:

jira --action run --file runExample.txt

With clever find and replace you should be able to go from a list of project keys to a JIRA CLI batch file in no time.

To the non English users, make sure you have no international characters in a JIRA CLI command.

I was again facing the problem, more than 1300 project to convert,so I worked out a partial solution for Jira 4.1. The solution ignores the status remapping, so it's not the ideal solution yet, but it saved me already a lot of time in case you want to introduce a new issue type with a new workflow. For those interested, I've put it on https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/3501/editing-a-workflow-scheme-without-spending-hours-manually-migrating-projects?page=1#142966

@ Holger; indeed! That's why I think it should be on top of the page and a big blinking warning. For us it's to late . (We are now going to try to bulk change the projects workflow with CLI but have to resolve the problem with the statusses that are in the old workflow and are missing in the new workflow. We found out that even if there are no issues in these statusses Jira still wants to kwow what to do with them.)

See Limitations when editing an active workflow. Only WARNING is missing.

A suggestion: If we would have known in the very beginning that it would not be possible to bulk change projects to new workflows we would have started of differently. I suggest that in the Workflow documentation (https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Configuring+Workflow) a big WARNING on top of the page would solve a lot of problems:

WARNING: When you start with JIRA and implement a Workflow you will NOT be able to either;

Delete a Workflow step!
Edit a step's associated Status!
If a step has no outgoing transitions, it cannot have any new outgoing transitions added.(example: if Closed hasn't a transition outgoing to i.e. Reopen, it will NOT be possible to make one later on. To be safe you should ALWAYS have outgoing statusses on each step!)
You cannot change a step's ID!

Ditto on Patrick.. we made a simple mistake when we modified a workflow today - one that is used on 318 projects. We missed a workflow outbound transition. As a result, we have to manually modify all 318 projects. This is at least 6-8 hours of work and possibly more. Please give us the ability to apply a workflow scheme to multiple projects (or add outbound transitions to active workflows).

Even if all restrictions on editing draft workflows were removed, there would still be a need for this feature when you want to move certain projects to a different type of workflow. With draft workflow editing restrictions in place, the need for this feature is major unless you have a small JIRA system.

Going on 8 years

Hi Andre,

Unfortunately I can't access that ticket with my support account for Jira. Is it possible take a look at it?

Thanks,

Rodolfo Romero

Same problem here. isn't there any script to help this migration? we have just added an issue type and we have to reassign all project. really annoyng

I just recreated the Hundred Tab Problem with REGEX, a spreadsheet and 63 tabs O_o

This is a classic case of "The Hundred Tab Problem" at JRA-24961

Atlassian, any progress on this issue?

I vote for this. When you start to have hundreds of projects and you want to add a new issue type and map to specific workflow for all projects. This is too tedious and prone to click and config errors.

I think I would just like the option present in an active workflow scheme "map issue type to workflow" and "change issue and workflow map" and it would run you through the steps to verify that all states etc are transitioned accordingly.

Not only that but fixing this would help my team's mouse-clicking fingers from cramping so bad.

@Keri, imaging the pain we have with 400+ projects. The 2 issues are different and not exclusive. One thing is modifying the workflow itself, which I'm so happy it can be done now and another totally different one is modifying the workflow scheme to add more issue types or change the mapping between issue types and workflows. At least, it would be nice if I could rename the workflow schemes so I don't end up having names like "Workflow Scheme v.11,000".

Now that the changes on the Admin GUI is out of the way. I hope Atlassian can start focusing on fixing core issues which have been a nightmare for Jira Administrators for years.

I would love to see this implemented. While I agree that the ability to create drafts in order to update active workflows is more helpful than this (and I was so happy when that was added!), this would still be very useful. At least at my company (and i'm sure many others), people are very indecisive and want to change/add things all the time. This includes adding new issue types and changes to workflows that require copying the workflow & re-associating it to a workflow scheme. Luckily we only have 22 projects, but just doing those 20 irritates me, so I can only imagine those above with far more projects. I also agree that it's prone to error as you have to really pay attention to which projects you've associated the new workflow scheme to.

I'm also interested in this feature. Even reporting the currently assigned workflow scheme via SOAP will be useful.

Holger, I'm interested in the Wetator test script because we introduced a new issue type and to assign it with the correct workflow we have to define a new workflow scheme and as a consequence we have to adapt all the existing projects their workflow scheme. Project counter is now 1187.

We want to delegate the creating of projects to people who we do not want to be Jira Administrators. We are looking at creating projects via the SOAP API and find it annoying that we can set permission and notification schemes but cannot set Workflow scheme. As this issue appears to supercede JRA-17870 I am curious that these SOAP elements are not mentioned in the description.

You could think about using Wetator http://www.wetator.org/ to do these bulk changes. It is an open source web testing framework, which you can also use for web application scripting.

I could create a Wetator test script and attach it here, to help you while waiting for SOAP and JIRA CLI. Whould that be a possible solution for you?

We desperately need this feature because this cost us too much time and money.
We standardized some processes in our company and as a result we had to define new workflows again.
We have 1136 project in Jira,you can image how much fun it is going through them manually one by one (and this is the second time this year).

I aggree with Luis. Changing (or at least initially define) "Issue Type Scheme", "Field Configuration Scheme" and "Issue Type Screen Scheme" through the SOAP API is really in need (and additionally default assignee and project category).

We are creating and maintaining nearly all projects via SOAP-API and currently we have to manually change some settings in every project. I don't think it would be difficult to provide this via SOAP (perhaps with some limitations like only when no issues are present).

we are working with many projects, and each change in (e.g) the "issuetype scheme" requires me to configure all the projects one by one, I understand that changing a workflow scheme is complicated, but at least it should be possible to change: "Issue Type Scheme", "Field Configuration Scheme" and "Issue Type Screen Scheme" through the SOAP API (something like ...: setProjectIssueTypeScheme ((...), setProjectIssueTypeScreenScheme setProjectFieldConfigurationScheme (...) and (...))

We need this urgently, for every project that we add the configuration is heavier, please help!

Hi guys,

Our situation is 60 projects, and we've just created a new issue type which we'd like to have a different workflow for on all of our projects. I don't think the previous updates to related issues address our problem, as they're all related to updating existing workflows within a currently live scheme, not adding new workflows.

Unless I'm reading it wrong, this means we currently need to:

1. Define the workflow for the new issue type
2. Copy the currently used scheme
3. Add the new workflow to the copy of the scheme for the new issue type
4. Go through all 60 projects one at a time, and switch them to use the new scheme

This is extremely tedious.

Is there a way we could do an interim workaround this at the database level, e.g. by simply adding a new row to the workflowschemeentity table?

Got 50 projects, just switched worfklow schemes and realized that I forgot to unhook one workflow and so now i got to do the whole list back, reset it, and then do the whole list back again, fix my transition issues (oh if only draft could have covered this) and do the whole thing back again when I am done. Now I'm not a whiner by nature, but only a hardened jira admin can truly appreciate the suffering that this approach entails. I can't imagine a bulk edit for projects that have the same workflow scheme would be too difficult to build in. Please have pity on me. My sanity may very well hang on the balance here .

I have 34 projects and I needed to add a new transition to the last transition which cannot be done by creating a draft. This workflow only affects a specific issue type within the entire workflow scheme that all my projects are using. Am I missing something or do I really have to:

1) Copy workflow x to workflow y
2) Add the transitions to workflow y
3) Copy workflow scheme a to workflow scheme b
4) Remove workflow x from workflow scheme b
5) Add workflow y to workflow scheme b
5) Remove workflow scheme a from all 34 projects (one at a time)
6) Delete workflow x
7) Delete workflow scheme a
8) Activate workflow y
9) Activate workflow scheme b
10) Add workflow scheme b to all 34 projects (one at a time)

This issue seems to have been open since 2005, 10 years later and the disruption this causes and the time this takes is even more unacceptable. Is there any fix in sight?

To have a JellyScript for this would be great.

I would like to have the same kind of functionality that we now have for Workflows, for Workflow Schemes. For instance I am not able to remove a Workflow/Issue type association from a Workflow Scheme if it is associated to a project. I need to create a copy of the Workflow Scheme, remove the workflow and associate all the projects to the new Workflow Scheme.

While the ability to edit an active workflow as a draft and republish it is a massive help - thanks atlassian! - there are still circumstances when this is not possible and a new workflow has to be created. The ability to assign a workflow scheme to multiple projects in one go would be great!

See JRA-7661 for update. This issue should be in the Resolved state.

We would love to see this implemented as well! We have many many projects using just a few workflows, and it would cut workflow maintenance time by 90% if I could bulk migrate projects to a new workflow. We're running JIRA Enterprise 3.12.2 with a Commercial license. I would LOVE to see this scheduled for 4.0, if not sooner.

In my world, the priority of this should be higher than Minor. We have over 200 projects, so every time I make a workflow change, I have to go through 200 manual steps.

What makes this worse is that we have 23000 issues, and because of the processing time required to update every issue to the new workflow, I can't just quickly plow through the 200 projects; on some projects, I have to wait 1 or 2 minutes. As a result, it can literally take HOURS of clicking to do a workflow change. I can parallelize it by opening 10 or 20 tabs at once in Firefox, but I still don't think it has ever taken me less than 1 hour.

If I could do it in bulk, I could at least click the "go" button and then come back later when it completes.

Hi Mathieu,

At the moment, unfortunately, I do not have an implementation date for this feature.

We are looking at implementing JRA-7661 at the moment and hope to deliver it with JIRA 4.0.

Cheers,
Anton

So when do you think this feature will be available? I see in the comment that this feature is asked since 2005. I hope this will be available soon. Today, I will have to change the workflow scheme for about 49 projects and the workflow did not change. I just add 2 issue type to a new workflow scheme because I can not add it to the current workflow scheme.

if editing a live workflow would be too much for a quick fix, I would be more than happy with locking out a workflow (which would in turn lock out all projects) while editing

A published workaround for this issue would suffice as a starting point. Is there a way that the update can occur by bypassing the Jira user interface and making a change direct on the filesystem while the server is down?

Yes, please. We have on startup of jira 50 projects and the grow more and more.

If you have voted for this issue but not for JRA-7661, please cast your vote there so we can get this bumped up the list!

Yes, that JRA-7661 would fix the issue for me as well. 99 times out of 100, I just want to make a change to the current workflow that is used on multiple projects, which has recently become impossible with the large numbers of projects we've entered into the tool.

I think that the need for this is precipated by the fact that you can't edit active workflows. I think JRA-7661 is the core problem.

I actually think they are almost duplicates.

The main pain is that we can't edit active workflows.

Addressing JRA-7661 would resolve this issue too.

Hi,

Thank you for your comments. May I ask if you believe that implementing JRA-7661(editable workflows) will hugely decrease the need for this feature? My current feeling is that implementing JRA-7661 before this feature will bring more immediate benefit to JIRA.

Having said this, unfortuantely, I do not have an actual implementation date for this feature (or JRA-7661), and therefore cannot promise a delivery date.

We would be very interested to know your thoughts on implementing JRA-7661 before this feature.

Cheers,
Anton

Perhaps someone from Atlassian could comment on this for us?

I'm guessing it's not a minor patch - but some idea of an expected release would be useful.

I agree completely. I think if everyone watching and voting starts being a little more active here, we might get some attention. Our contract is up for renewal soon, and this issue is one major factor in my decision. I love Jira otherwise, but if the issues we need don't get fixed, then we just may stay on the version we've got.

sorry if my first comment seemed a bit rude but I am going to be administering over 200 projects, most of which use the same workflow and I am still in eval mode!! I find it really hard to believe that this reuqest has been open for as long as it has and there hasn't been any progress on it !!?? If critical issues are going to be open for two years and still not get any focus, it certainly raises my concern when considering support prior to purchase.

Not trying to be mean just honest! Thoughts??

-Cheryl M

Same here. I administer a JIRA application with > 100 projects. When our QM folks demand a change for the workflows due to SOX, ISO9000 or other things that make our life a pain, this means for me a complete weekend shift in order to apply the new workflow to all projects. I wish I could hit ONE button Friday evening and check the results on Saturday morning. Either this or make the workflow changes much, much faster...

Best regards,
elert

the priority of this request should be EMERGENCY!!!! PLEASE fix this!!!

Agree with all comments.

We only have about 12 projects and constantly copying and re-assigning is annoying. Modifying live workflowswould be great, as would an easier way to assign schems to projects.

I personally find the schemes more annoying than useful, just another item to copy, rename then activate.

It might be nice to revert back to a similar more like before schemes were introduced, it was esier back then for smaller numbers of projects.

I agree with everyone that has commented. The task of editing a workflow is a real pain currently. Either make it where workflows can be edited live or make it easier to copy projects to another workflow scheme. I understand the concern with editing live workflows. Maybe provide a way to "lock" the workflow while it is being edited. Just a thought.

Please fix this soon. This is the single largest annoyance factor in maintaining and customizing jira.

David,

We want to do the editing of live workflows real soon. That is about as much as I can say at the moment.

Cheers,
Nick

The more projects we have, the more annoying this requirement is. I need to make a small change to the workflow, and I am in the middle of switching 20 projects over to a new workflow. Seeing as our current live issue tracking software has over 2000 projects, this will swiftly become impossible.

We really need a way to either:
1. Make changes to a live workflow.
or
2. Bulk move projects over to a new workflow scheme.

I have added JIRA-9096 which includes this issue as well as my other major workflow annoyance: The fact that you have to create copies of workflows and schemes in order to do anything. The height of tedium.

Yes, this would be VERY helpful! The way I work it is that we have a workflow that we like for all projects. To improve or change the workflow I copy it, make the change and then I have to move each project into the new workflow one-by-one. It takes a while.

I like the copy, change, move because I can make the change, move over a couple projects to test it out and then once I'm comfortable, move the rest of the projects. Then I can always fall-back to the previous 'version' of the workflow if something is wrong. So just a bulk move feature would be nice.

Yes PLEASE.
This seems to me that it would be an easy change that would make updating workflows so much easier. We could bulk assign projects that use workflow A to use workflow "A copy of A".
Edit A, then bulk assign them all back to A.

Currently the workflow is set on the project page. How about if we let users select the projects on the workflow scheme page? This would let one bulk-associate a group of projects with a scheme.