Update Referring Items
This workflow action is the successor of the old Fields to update in Workflow Transitions.
After you select this action in the Actions list, you also have to select the following in the cascading menu:
• The Relation between the tracker item, that is source or subject of the triggering event, and the items to update.
• The Project where to update items only if there are possible target Trackers in other projects, than the current one.
• The Tracker where to update items.
• The Status of the items to update.
The Statuses list is available within the New Action window.
You can select multiple statuses, therefore, reference items in the selected statuses can be updated with one Workflow Action.
In the example given below, the Type field value is updated to Functional in the reference items with New, Draft and Waiting for approval statuses:
Updating the Status field in New status, and the Priority field in Draft status within one Workflow Action is not supported. Two separate Workflow Actions are required to perform such actions.
There are two ways in which you can use the updating the referring items action:
• Updating items that is referred from the item. Also known as outgoing references. An example for a Requirement type of field: Parent Requirement -> Requirements -> New.
• Updating items referring to the item. Also known as incoming references. An example for a Requirement type of field that can also be read as its children: Requirements for Parent -> Requirements -> New.
In our example from Forking sub-processes from processes (work items), we choose to update Subject (Issues) with Status In Approval in the Tracker Processes of the current project WorkflowDemo.
The only custom parameter is the Fields to update. You can modify this parameter as follows:
• The field selector displays all editable fields of the selected target tracker items in the selected status. For each selected field, you can choose, whether to Set or Clear the value of that field.
• Depending on the field type, there are also additional type specific operations.
Text and Wiki fields also support to Prepend or Append a value to the existing value with an optional separator.
• Numeric and Duration fields also support Incrementing or Decrementing the existing value by the specified value.
In other words you can Add or Substract the specified value to the existing field value or from the existing field value.
Multiple Choice fields also support the Add or Remove. This allows you to use the specified values for the existing field values, or to Retain only those existing field values that are contained in the specified collection of those values.
In other words, it removes those existing values, that are not contained in the specified collection of values. The values that you apply can be:
• A constant value, that you can enter or select via the appropriate value editor.
• The Content of an assignment compatible field from the tracker item, that is source/subject of the triggering event.
• The Result of evaluating an expression on the tracker item, that is source/subject of the triggering event, that computes or calculates the value. For more details, see Computed Fields.
For example, set the Status of the items to update to Approved and also Add all Comments/Attachments of the tracker item, that is source or subject of the triggering event to the Comments/Attachments of the items to update.
To Edit a field to you want to update, do the following:
• Click the field value you want to edit.
• Click 
for the value you want to edit.
for the value you want to edit.To remove a field from the update action, click 
icon for the field you want to remove.
icon for the field you want to remove.
Ensure, that you have committed all open field value editors with OK, before you save the action to save your changes.
You can apply multiple value update operations on parameters and fields, that allow multiple values. For example:
• Assign the item to all Owners, except those having role Tester
◦ Assigned to: Set to content of Owner, Remove Tester
• Assign the item to all Owners, plus user bond
◦ Assigned to: Set to content of Owner, Add bond
• Remove all assignees in role Developer and newly assign users in role Tester
◦ Assigned to: Remove Developer, Add Tester
There can be also constellations with three or more operations. For example:
• Assign the item to all Owners, that have the role Administrator, except members of group System Admin
◦ Assigned to: Set to content of Owner, Retain Administrator, Remove System Admin
To add additional field value update operations, click More... on the field update editor.
To remove additional field value update operations:
• Click for the field value update operation, you want to remove.
for the field value update operation, you want to remove.Because the order of operations is significant, you can re-order additional field value update operations via drag-and-drop in edit mode.
Editor options
This section of the workflow action configuration is available only for creating and updating referring item actions.
• Open Editor: by default, the workflow action creates or updates a referring item and then updates the status of the original item. If this option is selected, the referring item is not updated or created automatically. Instead, Codebeamer shows the editor page with all field values that the user specified in the workflow action definition. If the user clicks Save on this editor page, the referring item is created or updated and the status of the original item is updated. If the user clicks Cancel on the editor, the referring item is not created or updated and the status of the original item is not updated.
• Switch to Referring Item: if this option is selected, a new item page is loaded in the browser after the referring item is created or updated by the action.