Link Changes

Link Changes

Linking Changes 

Link closely related change requests and create a parent-child relationship between them. You can associate multiple child changes with a single parent change.  

Benefits of Linking Changes

By linking related change requests, organizations can ensure better impact analysis in similar or related changes, such as staging to production migrations, antivirus patches, large-scale/multi-phase implementations, and the like.

Linking Rules 

  1. A change can be either a parent or a child, but never both.
  2. A child change can have only one parent.
  3. You can associate up to 25 child changes to a parent change.
  4. A change can be linked as a child only if it does not have an existing parent.
  5. You cannot link or unlink changes from a closed change.
  6. From an open change, you can link to any other change, regardless of its status.
Info
Users with edit permissions to the current stage can link and unlink changes.
  1. Go to Changes.
  2. In the list view, click the required change.
  3. On the change details page, click Associations in the left pane.
  4. In the Linked Changes section, click Attach. (Attach will not appear in closed changes)
  5. Choose one of the following:
    1. Select Child Changes to associate child changes with the current change.
    2. Select Parent Change to associate a parent change with the current change.
 
  1. In the linking pop-up, all Open Changes are displayed by default. Use the filter drop-down to view Closed Changes or All Changes. Select the required changes to associate. Add comments (optional) and click Associate.

Linking a Parent Change:

  1. After you link, the current change is marked as a Child Change, and the section name updates to Linked Parent Change.
  2. The linked change is marked as Parent Change on its details page.
  3. To change the parent, click Detach to remove the existing association, then link a new parent.

Linking Child Changes:

  1. After you link, the current change is marked as a Parent Change, and the section name updates to Linked Child Changes.
  2. The linked changes are marked as Child Change on their respective details pages, and the parent is linked accordingly.
  3. To remove children, select them from the list and click Detach.
  4. To add more, click Attach and associate the required changes.
 
Info
Users without permission to view the parent or child change can view the total number of linked changes only in the right pane and not the list in Associations.  
All linking operations, including comments, are captured in History.  
After detaching a linked change, the current change and the detached change will be available for linking.   

View Linked Changes  From List/Template View

To view linked changes from list/template views,
  1. Click Column Chooser  in the toolbar.
  2. Add the Linked Changes column to the list view/template view.
  3. For records with linked changes, Linked Changes shows whether they have:
    1. Child Changes (if the record is a parent change) with the number of linked children.
    2. Parent Change (if the record is a child change) with the parent change ID.
  1. Hover over the Linked Changes column against the parent/child record to view the relationship summary.
  2. Click the column to view the linked changes. To view details of a specific change, click View Details .

Delete Linked Changes 

When a parent or child change is deleted, their link is hidden in the application but retained in the system until either change is deleted permanently.
Restoring the change before its parent/children are linked elsewhere restores the links. Otherwise, the associations are removed permanently.

Closure Rules  

Info
Role Required: SDAdmin
You can set closure rules to ensure that a change is closed only after all its linked child changes are completed. 
Go to Setup > Automation > Closure Rules > Change Closure Rules > Mandatory fields for Close stage and enable Linked child changes must be completed.
 
The same rule can also be applied in workflow transitions (under Mandatory Rules) to validate the closure of linked changes before the transition.

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