How can I show the hierarchy within a filter?

Hi @Kim Wright !

You are right, a filter returns a flat list, so the Epic > Story > Sub-task structure disappears even when every level is in the results. JQL decides which work items come back, but it has no say in how they are displayed.

There are two native options that give you the nesting:

• The List view in your project keeps the parent-child structure, so you can expand an Epic and walk down to its sub-tasks. Heavy filtering can flatten it, but for reading one Epic's tree it works well.
• Jira Plans, which you have on Premium, pulls in boards, projects, and saved filters as work sources and shows them with hierarchy controls. This is the better fit when your reporting spans several teams or projects.

On our side, we approached this from a different angle. Our solution, Smart Hierarchy for Jira, adds a panel inside the work item view. You can open any work item and you will see the whole tree above and below it. 

For Epic-to-sub-task reporting, the panel gives you:

• Rolled up completion percentage across the hierarchy
• Total number of work items with their assignees
• Story points split by status, like To Do, In Progress, and Done
• Aggregated checklist progress, if your team uses Smart Checklist

Here is what that looks like:

The app is free, and it renders up to 50 work items per level. It starts from a work item rather than a saved filter, so it fits well when you want progress per Epic.

I covered all of these approaches in more detail in my article, How to Organize Jira Issue Tracking: 9 Options. It covers everything from the board and the List view to saved filters and JQL, the Release Hub, Jira Plans, and more. There is also a comparison table showing the tracking scope and the limitations of each option, so it might be a useful read for you.

I hope this helps!

Hi @Kim Wright,

The Jira search results screen does not show the issues hierarchically. 

You can get a hierarchical view in the List tab of the spaces/project. 

Another solution would be to use a plugin from Atlassian Marketplace. In case you want to use a plugin, our Great Gadgets app offers a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) gadget that is capable to display the issues hierarchically, in form of Initiatives > Epics > Stories > Subtasks, as a tree view or as a hierarchical list.

All you have to do is to configure it will a filter that returns the issues to be displayed, and it does the hierarchical grouping for you.

Hope this helps. 

Danut.

Hi!

This is a common pain point — JQL filters don't traverse the issue hierarchy, so a filter on an Epic won't automatically include its stories and subtasks. A few options:

1. Plain JQL — you can chain it manually: parent in ("EPIC-123") returns the stories, but reaching subtasks means listing story keys by hand, which doesn't scale.

2. Jira Premium — Since you're on Premium, issue in portfolioChildIssuesOf("EPIC-123") returns the whole subtree, and you can save that as a filter for dashboards.

3. Marketplace apps — full disclosure, I'm the developer of Plugio Suite: its "Work item progress" widget gives you hierarchy-aware reporting without any JQL: each parent gets a progress bar rolled up from its direct children — epics from their stories, and stories from their subtasks — and expanding a row shows the individual child issues with their statuses. You can scope it by project, filter by a specific epic, restrict it to a time window or the active sprint, and combine it with other widgets (pivot tables, charts, counters) on the same dashboard. Here's what it looks like:

Hope one of these fits your setup!

Hola Kim,

A Jira filter returns a flat list of matching work items, so it won’t automatically display the Epic > Story or Task > Subtask structure, even when the Parent field is included. JQL controls which items are returned, but it doesn’t provide a hierarchical presentation of those results.

Since you’re on Jira Cloud Premium, the native option is to use Plans. Create a plan from the relevant spaces, boards, or saved filters, then use the hierarchy controls to expand the work from Epic down through standard work items and subtasks. You can also create a saved view with the fields and filters needed for your report. Atlassian’s Plans documentation is here.

Make sure the plan’s work sources include every level you need. If the source filter returns only Epics, Plans won’t automatically add every descendant unless those children are also within the plan’s configured scope.

If you need the result outside Plans, such as in a dashboard gadget, CSV export, or scheduled report, could you clarify the intended output? Native filter results will remain flat, so the available approach depends on whether you need an interactive hierarchy, a downloadable report, or summarized progress by Epic.

Thanks,

James

Hi @Kim Wright,

Since you tagged your question as linked to a premium plan, you should be able to expose the hierarchy using Plans.

You are right that a filter (in itself) does not allow you to do anything related to hierarchy. But if you select all the work items you want to see hierarchically in a plan, that tool does the hierarchy magic for you. In there, you can add spaces, boards, filters and/or several of each as data sources to get all the pieces you need together.

Hope this helps!