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How-to: sync board state after a batch of PRs merge

Several PRs merged over the last day or so (end of sprint, a release train, catching up after being out), and the issues they closed haven’t had their Projects v2 board field updated yet — they’re still showing whatever status they had before the PR landed. Rather than clicking through each issue’s board card by hand, this walks the same field-sync tool across the whole batch of merged PRs.

Steps

Section titled “Steps”

  1. List the PRs you need to process — from whatever merged them (a release PR list, your own recent-merges view); this plugin doesn’t enumerate recently-merged PRs for you.

  2. For each merged PR, confirm what it actually closed before syncing anything — don’t assume you remember correctly:

    get_linked_issues { owner: "octo-org", repo: "widget-app", pullNumber: 88 }

    Each item in the result carries a source (closing_reference — GitHub’s own Fixes #N parsing — or heuristic, this plugin’s text-parse fallback) and alreadyTracked (whether the issue already carries MIF frontmatter from github-sdlc-planning). Treat a heuristic-sourced item with a bit more skepticism than a closing_reference one — it’s a best-effort match, not GitHub’s own authoritative closing-issue data.

  3. Sync the board field for that PR’s closed issues:

    sync_linked_issues_project_field {
      owner: "octo-org", repo: "widget-app", pullNumber: 88,
      projectOwnerLogin: "octo-org", projectNumber: 1,
      fieldId: "<the Status field's node id>",
      value: { kind: "singleSelect", optionId: "<the Done option's id>" }
    }

    This only works on a merged PR — it fails with not_merged otherwise, so if you’re processing PRs right as they merge rather than after the fact, make sure the merge has actually landed before calling this.

  4. Read the response’s three buckets, not just synced: notFoundOnBoard lists issue numbers the sync couldn’t place on the board, and skippedCrossRepo lists closing issues that live in a different repo than the PR (this tool only syncs same-repo issues — cross-repo closes are reported, never guessed at). Both need your own follow-up; they aren’t errors, but they aren’t “handled” either.

  5. Repeat for each PR in your batch. There’s no multi-PR call — one sync_linked_issues_project_field call covers one PR’s closed issues at a time.

A known limitation worth knowing before you rely on this

Section titled “A known limitation worth knowing before you rely on this”

The underlying board read this tool uses is unpaginated (it reads the first 100 items). On a board with more than 100 items, an issue that’s genuinely on the board can come back in notFoundOnBoard simply because it’s outside that first page, not because it’s actually missing. If your board is large and you see an issue in notFoundOnBoard that you’re confident is on the board, check manually before treating it as a real gap.