Bulk "change parent link" yields no results

[Eric R Hartway]

I need to link 1600 tickets to a single parent ticket.  All tickets are of the same issue type (task) and are within the same Jira Software project.  I have the bulk edit global permission and full admin permissions in the project itself, but when searching for the parent ticket to link, it returns with "No matches".  Manually linking from the parent ticket itself works as intended.  Is this a bug?  Is there some permission I'm missing?  See print screen attached for more info and thank you for any help with this issue. 

[Belto · Accepted solution]

Hi Eric,

This is happening because issues on the Story level (in your case Task) do not use the Parent Link field you're trying to update. This particular field is used in conjunction with the Hierarchy settings from Advanced Roadmaps and is only applicable for issue types above the Epic level.

Though you may be able to manually set this field, this is not its intended use. Issues on the Story level depend on the Epic Link field which is what you would have to use in this instance to link all these issues under a single parent Epic.

Cheers,

Belto.

[Eric R Hartway]

Thank you very much for the helpful information.

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Eric R Hartway 

What type of issue are you trying to make the parent of these issues? Are you trying to add them as children of an Epic? If so, you need to do the bulk change on the Epic Link field instead, as shown in the message in your screen image.

If you have not included an app that allows you to extend the issue hierarchy, then in the standard Jira issue hierarchy you will have

Epics are parents to Story/Bug/Task are parents to Sub-tasks

Generally Story/Bug/Task issues are "siblings" to each other and cannot be made parents of each other.

When setting an Epic as parent to Story/Bug/Task issue you need to update the Epic Link field.

Use the Parent Link field when you want to update the parent of a Sub-task.

[Eric R Hartway]

Thank you very much for the helpful information.  This solved my problem. 

[Sebastian Fredriksson Bernholtz]

According to comment on this fixed ticket, it sounds like you're supposed to use the parent field for tickets in Team managed projects.