Jira Datacenter supports archiving of issues since v8.1. By archiving issues, Jira will remove them from the indexes. The archived issues will still be accessible in read-only mode, however, they will not appear in search results. This enhances Jira performance because it stores less data in the indexes.

As many of the Xray entities are normal Jira issue objects, archiving its issues has the same effect of archiving any other Jira issue type. But additionally, Xray extends this feature by archiving some of its internal data.

The goal of this page is to describe the effects of archiving issues on Xray.

Archiving Test Executions

Archiving old Test Executions is a good use case for archiving Xray issues, especially if continuous integration processes are used. These can quickly create many Test Execution issues while importing new execution results into Xray on a daily basis. These issues are good candidates to be archived.

Archiving Test Execution issues will hide them from:

Archiving a Test Execution will also archive its Test Runs.

Archiving Test Runs

Archiving a Test Execution issue automatically archives its related Test Runs. Doing so will not delete the Test Run information from database, instead they will be:

A message will be shown in the Test and Test Execution issue view informing there are archived Test Runs:

And also in the execution page:

Test Runs archived via Test Execution issue can be restored at any time by restoring the Test Execution issue.

Archiving Tests

Archived Test issues:

Archiving a Test will also archive its Test Runs.

Archiving Test Runs

Archiving a Test issue will also archive its related Test Runs with the same effects described previously when archiving via Test Execution issue.

Test Runs archived via Test issue can be restored at any time by restoring the Test issue.

Archiving Test Plans

Archiving Test Plans will hide them from:

Archived Test Plans will also no longer be used as scope for the Test Run Status and Requirement Status.

Effects in the Test Run and Requirement status scope

Archived Test Plans are no longed used as scope for the Test and Requirements status custom fields, which affects the scope analysis of Requirements and Tests: After archiving a Test Plan TP, a given Requirement R that was NOK in the scope of TP will be UNCOVERED for the same scope TP.

Another effect of not being used as scope is that the Latest Statuses of Tests under a Test Plan issue will not be shown anymore. For this reason, when archiving a Test Plan, a message will be displayed informing of the situation:

An archived Test Plan issue can be restored anytime, doing so will retrieve the Test Plan state prior to archiving and all of the Test Plan-scoped statuses for Tests and Requirements.

Archiving Requirements

Archived Requirements will be excluded from:

Archiving Requirements will also archive their Sub-Test Executions.

Archiving Sub-Test Executions

Each issue is archived along with all its subtasks.

In case a Requirement is archived, its Sub-Test Executions will be archived as well. A Sub-Test Execution has the same functionalities of a Test Execution so archiving them have the same effect as archiving a Test Execution issue, namely all its Test Runs will be archived.

Archiving Test Sets and Pre-Conditions

Archived Test Sets and Pre-Conditions will be excluded from:

Archiving Projects

When archiving a Project all its issues are archived as well, including the Xray ones.

The effects of project archiving will be the same as archiving issues.

For example, the archived issues will no longer be present on JQL results and if Test or Test Executions are found, Xray will also archive their internal data, namely its Test Runs.

Impact on Xray Issue Links

This section refers to the Xray custom issue links only (e.g. Tests associated with Pre-Conditions, with Test Sets, etc.) and not to the Jira native issue links.

Whenever issues are archived, those will no longer be present on JQL search results.

Due to the fact that Xray Issue Data Table components, used for presentation of Xray issue associations, are built on top of JQL searches and that archived issues no longer appear in those search results, the links will no longer be shown in some issue views. Because of that, there is no way to know if an issue is still linked to an archived one.

Whenever this happens, a warning message will be displayed at the top of the affected Xray Issue Data Table informing that some associated issues are being hidden. The below image shows an example of the Test Sets section in a Test issue view after archiving one of its related Test Sets.


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