What are the templates?
The templates are reusable sets of conditions, validators and post functions. They're defined once and can be used as many times as necessary. One template can be used in one or more transitions across many workflows. There are some extra features brought to Jira with condition and validator templates such as:
- Condition result inversion,
- Validator result inversion,
- Logical operators in workflow validators (similar to conditions),
- Customized validation error messages (one for the whole set of validators),
- Templates usage tracking across workflows and transitions,
- Templates diagnostics to find conditions, validators and post functions configured incorrectly,
- Nested templates support (using a template-in-template).
Executing templates
Templates are just definitions that have to be executed in specific workflow transitions. Running a template is possible by adding a special condition/validator/post function to transitions. It doesn't matter how many elements there are in a template, you only need to add one template to execute all underlying elements.
If a template is changed and published, all workflow transitions reflect the change immediately.
Updating templates
Please note that a single template can be used many times, so editing it once can affect many transitions where the template is used. To avoid interrupting user's work when editing a template, we use a publishing technique the same as in Jira workflows. Do not forget to publish your changes.