JIRA Structure - epics without issues

[Will Jenkins]

When using Structure's automation feature I struggle to find a good way to handle Epics that do not yet have any issues attached to them. When building a backlog top-down we will often create Epics without knowing specifics of the Stories, and in Structure it's easy to lose them. When using the "Insert Epics" generator to explicitly add the  they are put into the "No Epic" folder alongside dupes of all the other Epics, making it hard to understand the structure of the project.

I have tried the answers proposed here:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Marketplace-Apps-Integrations/ALM-Structure-Epics-without-tasks-do-not-show-up-with-generators/qaq-p/663214

and here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Marketplace-Apps-Integrations/structure-plugin-how-to-disappear-quot-No-epic-quot-folder/td-p/588125

I haven't been able to make them work and the Remove Duplicates filter doesn't seem to do anything. I'm probably doing something wrong but I'm not sure what it might be - any advice would be greatly appreciated.

This is the automation script:

This is the outcome, showing duplication.

Thanks kindly!

[Garil Dox]

Hi @Will_Jenkins ,

it's been a while, since you posted your question, so I hope, you've found a solution in the meantime. However, I had a similar problem, recently, and this solved the issue of duplication for me, so I'm leaving an answer here for anyone with a similar problem: In the insert automation, use

(issuetype not in ( Epic ) OR (issuetype = Epic AND issueFunction not in hasLinkType("Epic-Story Link")))

This will only insert Stories, Tasks, Bugs, etc. (exclude any other issuetypes you don't want listed in the issuetype-not-in statement). Additionally, it inserts epics that don't have any stories. Grouping the inserted issues by Epic shows all the epics that have stories in addition to the ones without stories, which are already in the list.

The epics without stories still end up in the No Epic section (which is very annoying), I haven't found a decent solution for that, yet.

I gathered the tip with the issueFunction from this thread: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Core-Server-questions/How-to-filter-epics-without-stories-by-using-JQL/qaq-p/1283443