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What Happens if Work Items Synced With Unito Are Moved or Deleted?

Tasks, tickets, cards, issues and other work items often move from project to project within a tool. However, that movement might affect your Unito flow. 

Table of contents:

Whether you’re working in a project management tool, CRM, or software development tool, work items might not always stay in the same block of work (a container for your work items, e.g.: a project, epic, or board).

A task might be created in one place, but then move to another as its status or purpose changes. So how can you support those changes automatically with Unito?

What happens when a work item is moved out of a block of work

What happens

By default, Unito syncs work items from one block of work (e.g., a project or board, etc.) to another. Imagine a flow connecting an Asana project called Building Oz with a Jira project called Wicked Project. Meanwhile, there's another Jira project called Wizard of Oz  isn't connected to either of them with a flow. 

For now, if a task is created in connected Asana or Jira projects, work items will sync between them.

But what happens when a task is moved from the Wicked Project in Jira to Wizard of Oz? 

Here's the task in Jira.

And in Asana.

When the task is moved to the other Jira project, this will effectively break the sync with Unito. The task in Asana will continue to exist, but it will no longer sync with the task in Jira.  

To make sure your tasks stay in sync, there are two simple options with Unito.

Connect the second Jira project to the Asana project

If you want to keep a work item synced after moving it to a different project, you need to create a flow that links that other project to Asana.

Once the new flow has been created, tasks will start syncing again with Unito. You won’t need to make any changes to the way you and your team works and can still sync information to and from Jira with Unito.

Since this task was moved between projects, Unito will consider it a new task that was added to the second project. So you may end up seeing two tasks in Asana (or your other tool of choice) with the same name. All you have to do now is merge them into one.

Keeping your item in sync instead of moving it

If you’d like to avoid having to merge tasks, there is a way to keep it in sync across all three blocks of work that we've connected with Unito.

Create another flow between the two Jira projects, as you can see below:

Just be sure to set up a rule that specifies which tasks in the original Jira project should sync to the second Jira project, and vice versa. 

Now, instead of actually “moving” the Jira task from one project to another, you can simply sync it with Unito. This means the task will live in both Jira projects, be worked on by either team, and it will also be available to view in our single Asana project. 

Even better, all teams in two Jira projects and Asana will be able to collaborate in real-time so that changes to the task or issue will appear everywhere else.

With this method, you just need to remember to sync the task from Jira to Jira instead of moving it via Jira’s native movement functionality.

What happens when you delete a work item synced with Unito

When you delete a work item synced with a Unito flow, you permanently break the link between that item and the original work item it was synced from. Unito won't automatically delete the paired work item. Why? This ensures there's no risk of Unito permanently removing data you might want to get back.

Unito also won't recreate the deleted work item the next time your Unito flow checks for updates. Unito flows assume that, once a work item is deleted, you don't want it back. This prevents Unito flows from creating copies of work items you want to stay deleted.

There are a few workarounds if you want to recover a deleted work item and keep syncing it with the work item it was originally paired with.

How to fix this

In these workarounds, we'll assume Tool A is where the original work item lives and Tool B is where the synced work item was deleted.

  1. If all the work items in Tool B were synced there from Tool A, you can create a new block of work in Tool B (e.g., project, board) and edit your Unito flow so it syncs to that block of work instead of the original. This will automatically populate the new block of work with all work items from Tool A that fit your rules.
  2. Duplicate the work items in Tool A that were original paired with deleted work items in Tool B. Unito will sync them normally.
  3. Undo the deletion in Tool B. Note that this is only supported with some tools.