Automation: Manual epic closure should lead to closing all children including their sub-tasks

[Harald Heinz]

Hi,

I want to set up an automation to close down all the epics children and their subtasks. The part with the children works, but the level with the subtasks is still where I struggle. 

• Tried to add another branch for sub-tasks -> but this will only look for them directly under the epic
  
  

Any ideas?

[Chitra Nagdeo · Accepted solution]

Hey @Harald Heinz ,

Welcome to Atlassian Community Forum, My name is Chitra and I am part of Jira Cloud support team in Atlassian. I understand you want to close/complete child standard workitem and subtask workitem when the Epic is closed. 

To achieve this you must create two Automation rule:

• To transition standard workitem type to Done status category when the Epic is marked as Done (already working as I understand)
• Second rule to mark subtask linked with Standard workitem type to Done when the parent is marked as Done by the first rule. Refer article: Automation for Jira - How to automatically close sub-tasks from a parent issue

On second rule check the option "Check to allow other rule actions to trigger this rule. Only enable this if you need this rule to execute in response to another rule."

The above steps will help you achieve the requirement, thank you and have a nice day!

Thanks and Regards
Chitra Nagdeo

[Thuan_ Do Dang · Accepted solution]

Hi @Harald Heinz ,

You should separate to 2 automation. The first one to close epic children, the second one to close sub-tasks. And don't forget to enable "Check to allow other rule actions to trigger this rule. Only enable this if you need this rule to execute in response to another rule." of the second automation.

Hope this helps!

[Alexander Hohmann · Accepted solution]

You could use cascading rules:

• One triggered when an Epic is closed and that closes all task level items.
• A second one that is automatically triggered when a task level item is closed that closes all subtasks. You need to enable this rule to be triggered by other rules.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Harald Heinz -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I recommend implementing this scenario with one single rule rather than chained rules.  That approach will reduce the risks of rule errors, failures, or an Atlassian automation outage preventing the chained rule(s) from running.  (My understanding is there is no guarantee after an outage that rules which were supposed to run by-events will actually run later.)

This approach can be done with one rule as long as there are 100 work items, or fewer, involved. To do this with one rule:

• trigger: manual
• issue fields condition: issue type equals Epic
• action: lookup work items / issues, to gather the child issues of the parent Epic
  • parent = {{triggerIssue.key}}
• branch on JQL: use the lookup results and each work item's subtasks smart value to gather the full list, children and grandchildren (i.e., subtasks)
  • key IN ( {{#lookupIssues}}{{key}}{{#if(subtasks.size.gt(0))}},{{subtasks.key.join(",")}}{{/}}{{^last}},{{/}}{{/}} ) AND statusCategory != Done
  • action: transition the work item

The part which gathers all of the child and grandchild work items is this:

{{#lookupIssues}}{{key}}{{#if(subtasks.size.gt(0))}},{{subtasks.key.join(",")}}{{/}}{{^last}},{{/}}{{/}}

The way that works is:

• iterating over the lookup results
• get the work item's key
• using a conditional expression, check if there are any subtasks found
• and if so, add those keys, joined together with commas
• finally, adding a conditional comma between work item keys, except after the last one

Kind regards,
Bill

[Harald Heinz]

Thank you all, the mentioned checkbox made the difference as I already created a second automation. 

But: can somebody explain, how this checkbox works. I mean, how does the second automations rule dynamics work once this checkbox is used with regards to the first rule if it is not explicitly linked?

[Chitra Nagdeo]

Hey @Harald Heinz ,

In Jira automation rules, the setting "Check to allow other rule actions to trigger this rule. Only enable this if you need this rule to execute in response to another rule" determines if a rule can be initiated by actions performed within other automation rules. If this option is checked, the rule can be triggered by actions in other rules. If unchecked, the rule will only be triggered by its defined trigger. 

Hope this helps!

Regards

Chitra Nagdeo