The ability to skip multiple stages for a single input result will come along as part of JENKINS-46809 - the architecture makes it not viable to have something that happens in a stage (input, environment, etc) actually carry over as an environment variable to other sibling stages, but sequential nested stages will let you say "here's a parent stage with an input and a when - if the when passes, run this list of other stages".

Ordering is hard. =) I made the call that there was more value in having the result of input available for when than avoiding the input directive if an unrelated when condition was false. It was either input and then when in evaluation order, or when and then input, so...yeah. Again, once JENKINS-46809 lands, you could do a "parent" stage with the branch when condition, with a single nested stage with the input-based when condition. Not the most elegant syntax, sure, but trade-offs have to be made in order to have the opinionated behavior and structure Declarative provides.

The nested stage is an interesting hint. As far as I see, this is only possible with parallel, so ... yeah ... not optimal. But I'll give it a try with something like this. The downside is, that still only one (sequential) stage can be created.

stage('Release Approval') {
   when {
     branch 'master'
   }
   parallel {
     stage('Release') {
       input {
         # manual approval of release
       }
       when {
         # the release is approved
       }
       steps {
         # release and deployment
       }
     }
  }
}

aklemp - Yeah, https://github.com/jenkinsci/pipeline-model-definition-plugin/pull/227 (which will hopefully merge/release next month) will give you a better approach.

Is it possible to distinguish between 

 
input { # manual approval of release }

when {# the release is approved}

and

when { # the release is approved }

input {# manual approval of release}
 

And make the order of appearance determine what prevails?

I realize that probably there is no notion of ordering for these declarations, only for stage inside stages (several elements of the same type can be ordered).

Perhaps an input condition to use inside when?

Or an argument to input to tell it to run after when?

Of course if this is used the input value cannot be used in the when condition.

I am trying to suggest something here as I have already hit the situation where I wanted them reversed, and I guess we'l have something like 50-50% of us wanting it one way or the other.

I have a similar issue to fnasser. I have 2 parallel stages, one for dev and one for prod and a when condition determines which stage to run based on the environment. I want to prompt for input in the prod stage only but as the input happens before the when I get prompted for input in regardless of the environment, 

Perhaps add a 'when' configuration option to the 'input' directive?

This way we could skip the input for certain cases (like for Liam's prod stage) or even have a different input for each case by playing with the right 'when' conditions.

We're adding the ability to have when be evaluated before input runs over at JENKINS-50880.

OK, just for the sake of people who look at this JIRA.

How do we get  when first, input after ?

How do we get  input first, when after ?

Bulk closing resolved issues.