Link children to parent

[Tom Grant]

I need to link child issues to their parents. This is not an epic link, just generic issues that I need to link in a parent-child relationship. That does not seem to work via bulk change (the bulk change wizard says it can't find the parent issue). 

Unfortunately, bulk import via CSV file doesn't seem to work the way I want it. Take a simple example:

Issue A (parent)

--- Issue A1 (child)

--- Issue A2 (child)

I've created Issue A. I have not yet created the children, A1 and A2. I've created a CSV file for defining the children that has the following information:

Child Summary,Parent ID

Issue A1,PRO-123

Issue A2,PRO-123

In the importer, I can specify a parent link. Unfortunately, it seems only to create Issues A1 and A2 as parents of Issue A, instead of the other way around.

How can I use the importer to create A1 as A2 as children of A?

By the way, it would also help to know how to create links between existing issues. But for now, I'm happy to resolve this challenge.

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Tom Grant 

If you want to create links between a newly created issue and an existing issue via CSV you need to map the column that contains the existing issue key to one of the Links types for the type of link you want to create between the two issues.

Refer to this document.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/how-to-import-issue-links-from-a-csv-file-in-jira-740262715.html

[Tom Grant]

Trudy, thanks for the speedy reply. My question really is, which of those link types should I be using, so that the new story links to the parent? Here's the kind of information I have in the CSV file:

In other words, I want to create a new story and make PRO-1234 the parent. When I select the Link "Parent" option, mapping to PRO-1234, Jira creates the new would-be child as the parent of PRO-1234. If I choose the Parent ID option, Jira thinks I want to create a sub-task (even if I specify "Story" as the Issue Type.)

I must be doing something wrong here.

[Trudy Claspill]

The creation of the link depends on how the Link Type has been defined in Jira.

From the referenced document:

When importing the issue link via CSV, Jira will consider the link you provide as the Outward link description. You can't choose between Inward or Outward links. 

And then the give examples with the Blocks and Clones link types.

If you look at the Issue Linking configuration page you see the types of links that have been defined. Each one has an Outward and Inward Description. These are the descriptions you see when viewing an issue and looking at the Linked Issues section, describing how the issue you are view is related to the linked issue.

For the Blocks link type the configuration is

As per the documentation when you use this in your CSV import then the issue that you are creating will be Outward Description relationship to the issue you specified.

imported issue "blocks" specified issue.

If your Parent link type is set up thus:

Link type	Outward Desc.	Inward Desc
Parent	is parent of	is child of

Then when you use that for your CSV import you will get

imported issue "is parent of" specified issue.

Importing does not current support the ability to force the relationship to be the other way.

[Tom Grant]

It works! Many thanks for your very helpful explanation.

[Trudy Claspill]

Glad I could help.

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