Every now and then the question as to whether it is possible to store data between workflow executions comes up. For example, when a team lead wants to show an informational message to the entire team, once to each person. The most straightforward way to achieve this would be to add a flag "hasSeenTheMessage" to each user account. However, YouTrack doesn't allow you to define properties like this via the workflow, though we are planning to support such use-cases in some form or another in the future. In the meantime, I want to show you how to work around this problem using the existing

I'm happy to announce that after almost a year-long break I'm back with the "Make It Workflow" series. Back then, we published a whole load of posts dedicated to talking you through various YouTrack usage scenarios and how to set up the workflows for them. Through this series so far, we’ve covered topics such as restricting issue visibility, generating time reports, and enhancing mailbox integration. You are welcome to check out the “Make it Workflow” series if you haven't done so already. We are reviving Make it Workflow today with our next installment in the series: updating issues. You

In this installment, we show you a few techniques for extending your Mailbox Integration with workflows. (more…)

In previous posts, we have described improvements for popular use cases that you would expect to be supported in an issue tracker. In addition to standard features like time tracking and helpdesk automation, YouTrack is capable of supporting really unusual scenarios with workflows. In this post, we look at how to use YouTrack as a platform for sending email newsletters. (more…)

Many organizations use an issue tracker to support their helpdesk. YouTrack provides tools that let you communicate with your customers by email without creating accounts for every user. In this post, we describe how workflows help you further improve helpdesk support. (more…)

In our previous post, we took a look at the Time Tracking feature and showed you how to use workflows to make sure that your colleagues add work items properly (that is, avoid cheating). In this post, we describe how you can use workflows to report and analyze time tracking data. (more…)

Welcome back to our Make It Workflow series! In previous posts, we described solutions to problems like how to shield your issues from spying eyes and strategies for streamlining issue creation. From here on out, we’ll look at workflows that support specific use cases, like enhancing time tracking functionality or making your helpdesk more powerful. Let’s start with time tracking. (more…)

Over the last month, we have investigated various aspects of the issue lifecycle. We described how to set up granular read and write access for existing issues, how to streamline issue creation, and even how to generate issues automatically. If you missed any of our previous installments, you can find all of these articles by filtering for posts with the tag "makeitworkflow". The last thing we want to cover in this part of our Make It Workflow series is how to automate issue updates. As always, the purpose of this automation is to make YouTrack do the dirty work for you. (more&helli

Last week, we shared a few tips for streamlining issue reporting. The goal was to improve the simplicity and accuracy of issue creation for your team and for your customers. In this article, we take it one step further. Imagine what happens when you need to create a standard set of issues on a regular basis. Who has the time or patience to spam the Create Issue button and set values for each field in every issue? If your answer is “not me”, read on to learn how to generate issues in YouTrack automatically. (more…)

In previous installments, we discussed how to restrict issue visibility and prevent unwanted updates. We still haven’t covered what is possibly the most important aspect of the issue life cycle — its birth. In this article, we describe how you, your team, and your customers can create issues that contain the most accurate and detailed information from day one. (more…)

The previous article in our Make it Workflow series showed you how to set up complex visibility restrictions for issues. We limited the ability to read issues to specific groups of people and restricted read access for different sets of users for issues in a single project. In this post, we describe how to block unwanted changes to fields in an issue. We’ll continue to support the business case that we described in the previous article. We’re working with an accounting department whose members process payment requests. These users belong to a group of Executors. Payment requests are sub

With this article, we begin a series of blog posts that demonstrate how to support specific processes in YouTrack with the help of workflows. This post is devoted to visibility restrictions. Specifically, we’ll show you how to restrict visibility so that each issue can be read by a very limited set of people and manage visibility independently for each issue in a project. (more…)