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Bulk edit

Bulk edit works in the List and Table layouts, on up to fifty issues at a time.

  1. Select the checkbox on each row you want, or the checkbox in the header to select everything currently filtered.
  2. An action bar appears reading Edit 12 issues, with the count in it.
  3. Choose an action.
Action What it does
Set labels Replaces the labels on every selected issue
Set assignees Replaces the assignees on every selected issue
Set milestone Sets or clears the milestone
Set state Opens every selected issue, or closes them all with one reason
Set field Sets a project’s single-select field, Status by default, on every selected issue that is an item in that project

Why labels and assignees replace rather than add

Section titled “Why labels and assignees replace rather than add”

Both sets are replaced, not added to. Pealboard holds a copy of your issues, and a copy can be a few seconds behind GitHub; adding one label means sending the whole set, which means sending a set built from that copy. If a colleague added a label in GitHub a moment ago, “add one label” would silently remove theirs.

So the control asks for the whole set and says so. To add a label to twelve issues that already carry different labels, filter to the ones that share a set, or open them one at a time — where the label editor reads each issue’s own labels first.

Each issue is a separate write to GitHub, sent in order and paced so the installation’s request budget is not exhausted. Progress is shown as a count.

If GitHub refuses one of them, that issue is left unchanged and named in the result — “GitHub refused the write on acme/app#412: reason. 11 of 12 issues were changed.” The rest are not rolled back, because a partial change that is reported exactly is more useful than an undo that would itself be twelve more writes.

Set state closes every selected issue with one reason — Completed or Not planned — or reopens them all. The reason is chosen once and applied to all of them, so use it when the reason is genuinely the same. Completed is shown to portal customers as Completed, Not planned as Closed.

  • It does not delete anything.
  • It does not change issue bodies.
  • It does not act on issues outside the current filter, even if the header checkbox is selected: the selection is what is on screen, and the count in the action bar is the exact number that will change.
  • It does not act on more than fifty issues at once. Each one is a separate write to GitHub, and the action bar says so when the selection is larger.