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Troubleshoot workflow triggers
If you are having problems setting up a trigger or getting a trigger to work, follow the steps below to troubleshoot your problem.
Use the trigger diagnostics
Your first step in troubleshooting a trigger is to check the diagnostics for it in Jira. The diagnostics can tell you if there is a problem with the connection to your development tools or whether an issue did not automatically transition as expected.
Select > Issues.
Under WORKFLOWS, click Workflows.
Find your workflow and click View in the Actions column.
In Text mode (not Diagram mode), click the desired transition.
On the transition screen (Triggers tab will be showing), click View details for the desired trigger to show the diagnostics information.
The 'Trigger sources' section lists problems related to the integration between Jira and your development tools. For example, whether you have the correct type of authentication configured.
The 'Transition failures' section lists issues that have failed to automatically transition despite the trigger firing. For example, an anonymous user was mapped to the transition but the transition has a post function that requires a non-anonymous user.
Check for common problems
If you cannot resolve your problem with the information from the trigger diagnostics, check the list of common problems below for possible causes and solutions.
I cannot add a trigger to a transition
Cause | Solution |
|---|---|
Jira or your development tools are not the correct version | Install/upgrade to the correct version. |
Your development tools are not connected to Jira correctly | Check the configuration of your connection:
|
The trigger that you are trying to add has already been added to the transition | Do nothing. All triggers are unique per transition, that is, you can only add a trigger to a transition once. |
The issue does not transition
Cause | Solution |
|---|---|
Your project is not using the workflow that has been configured with triggers |
|
You have not saved your workflow changes where the triggers were added | Navigate to the workflow that you added triggers to. Check that it has been published by viewing the workflow transitions and confirming that your triggers are present. |
Jira cannot be reached by your DVCS | Wait an hour. If it still cannot be reached after an hour, check that the connection to your DVCS is configured correctly, see Integrating with development tools. If triggers are not configured or Jira is not reachable from Bitbucket/GitHub, then the delay might be up to one hour, as there is still an hourly synchronization of commits/branches/pull requests happening regardless of the triggers configuration. Learn more about event handling and event limits. |
Your DVCS repository is not linked to the synchronized DVCS account | Navigate to the Jira administration console > Add-ons > DVCS Accounts and enable your repository. If you have not configured Bitbucket or GitHub to autolink new repositories, you may have repositories that are not enabled (i.e. linked to your DVCS account). This means that events from the unlinked repository will not be sent to Jira, hence the issue will not transition automatically, even if you have configured a trigger. |
Your commits are too old | Only commits less than 21 days old will cause a transition. This is to prevent bulk uploads from causing bulk transitions. |
The operation is not permitted for anonymous users | Check that each user in your development tools maps to a Jira user. Certain issue operations will throw exceptions when the transition is performed by an anonymous user. These are:
A triggered transition is performed by an anonymous user if the event in the development tool cannot be mapped to a Jira user. Learn more about user mapping. |
The maximum number of automatic transitions permitted for an issue has been exceeded | Check that your workflow transitions do not end in an infinite loop. |
Automatic issue transition events are incorrectly suppressed by the development tool | Change the repository/project settings to allow events to be sent. You may have configured Bitbucket Data Center (Stash 3.3 - 3.5) or Fisheye (3.5+) repositories to suppress events sent to Jira for workflow triggers, if duplicate events were being sent. Duplicate repository events may be sent to Jira when you have the same repository indexed by multiple development tools. Jira will automatically remove duplicate commit events and branch creation events when processing workflow triggers. You shouldn't suppress repository events from Bitbucket Data Center or Fisheye, unless duplicate events are causing issues to transition incorrectly. |
The issue transitions but not as expected
Cause | Solution |
|---|---|
You have configured a trigger on a global transition | Investigate how the trigger event affects issues in different statuses. Consider removing the trigger from the global transition. We recommend that you do not configure triggers for global transitions, unless you are confident that you understand exactly how the trigger will affect the behavior of the issue. Learn more about triggers and global transitions. |
Workflow conditions, validators and permissions are intentionally ignored for automatic issue transitions | Do nothing. If you were expecting workflow conditions, validators or permissions to be applied to an automatic issue transition, then please note that none of these apply. Related to this, post functions do apply to automatic issue transitions. |
Your workflow is shared across multiple projects | You may need to copy your workflow, if you want triggers to apply to the workflow for some projects but not others. Triggers apply to the workflow. If a workflow is shared across multiple projects, it will include all triggers that have been configured for it. |
Duplicate automatic issue transition events are being sent by multiple development tools | Change the repository/project settings in one (or more) of your development tools to prevent events from being sent. Duplicate repository events may be sent to Jira when you have the same repository indexed by multiple development tools. Jira will automatically remove duplicate commit events and branch creation events. If you are not using the latest Jira version and have duplicate repository events causing incorrect issue transitions, you can configure Bitbucket Data Center (Stash 3.3 - 3.5) and Fisheye (3.5+) repositories to suppress events sent to Jira for workflow triggers. |
The information recorded for the transition is not correct
Cause | Solution |
|---|---|
The users in your development tools do not map to users in Jira | Check that each user in your development tools maps to a Jira user. If users are not mapped correctly, then the user for the issue transition will be anonymous. For more information, see the section on user mapping above. |
Known issue: The correct user is only shown on the 'History' and 'Activity' tabs for issues in Jira, and in notification emails. In other notifications (e.g. 'Transitions' tab for issues) an anonymous user is shown. | Do nothing. This is a known issue that will be fixed in a future release. |
Get more help
If you still cannot resolve your problem, there are a number of other help resources available, including our applications forums, Atlassian community, and our support team.
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