Find an Issue's Epic association

[Pierce Gleeson]

I am building a connector to Jira Cloud that, among other things, looks to see whether or not any given Issue is part of an Epic. Right now, I am trying to do that by looking at each individual Issue, and setting its epic association based on the value of the `parent` field on the Issue api response.

This seems to work fine when I use my own Jira instance to test, but not so much with my client's Jira instance. I've noticed some differences between the custom fields available, but I don't have a ton of information about what plugins, etc. are on the client instance. I believe that they are not using Jira Premium, as I am. 

What I would like to know is, what is the most consistent way to learn about Issue-Epic relationships in the Jira Cloud API? 

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Pierce Gleeson 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Do your or the client use both Company Managed and Team Managed projects?

Are subtasks in the instances?

Atlassian has been implementing some changes to move towards both types of projects using the Parent field to note the parent Epic.  Refer to

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-articles/Introducing-the-new-Parent-field-in-company-managed-projects/ba-p/2377758

In a Premium instance and another Free instance I can access I see that Parent is being used to track both the parent Epic for an issue and the parent standard issue for a subtask. 

When I look at the same issues with the API I see there also that the Parent field is used for both types of values.

Could that explain the discrepancies you see?

[Pierce Gleeson]

Hi Trudy, thanks for your quick response. It might - I need to follow up with them on the questions you raised to be sure. In the meantime, I'll move towards using the parent field, if that is the new standard.