Can I combine two quick filters to dynamically neg one of them?

Question

I have some quick filters to filter, for example, by assignee name. I wanted to use those filters in the opposite way, i.e. to exclude that assignee from the board and show only all of the others. I can do that with "NOT assignee = " query but I can't combine two queries like "NOT" and "assignee = " on a quick filter since I am not allowed to have a "NOT" only filter. Is there any workaround for this?

Earl McCutcheon · Answer

HI @femosso ,

Happy to help, and I was doing some more digging on this one to see If i could locate a better solution that fit your use case, and found the following Feature request that I recomend adding a vote to to help us track interest in for implementation as I believe this would really help you out by providing a dynamic quick filter, exe create 2 assignee filters one for not in and one for user is in like i described above, but rather than having to create a filter for ever member of the team you could dynamically select the user ad-hoc on the 2 filters.

There is a Request for both Cloud and Server respectively incase anyone finds this thread on the alternate platform looking for the same solution:

* https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWSERVER-15980
* https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-4735

Currently it is flagged for future consideration and noted that we do not have an immediate plan to implement this feature, but do make sure to add a vote if this is something you would like to see and add some feedback in the comments highliting your use case to help influence a priority bump.

Also I did find another post mentioning the add-on The Agile Board FIlter  as a possible workaround, and might be worth taking a closer look at, as this one allows for custom JQL quick filters directly on the board view and looks like it could be useful here.

The other Thread can be seen at the following link:

* https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Additive-Quick-Filters/qaq-p/1603

Regards,
Earl

femosso · Answer

Thanks Earl, for your response!

Unfortunately creating dedicated quick filters to exclude specific assignees (using !=) is not something that I was willing to do since it will increase a lot the number of filters I currently have.  Best world would be to have a filter that would simply neg the other combined one, but I understand this is not possible since quick filters do an "AND" operation in the background.

Thanks anyways and have a good day!

Earl McCutcheon · Answer

Hi @femosso ,

First as a referance point for the follow up info the full documentation on the JQL filter operations can be found at the following documentation page and its sub pages:

* Advanced searching

And as you noted there is not an option to only apply a modifier by itself as the quick filters are sefl contained full filters and when used in conjunction with each other are basically doing a "(Quick_Filter_1) AND (Quick_Filter_2)" in the background

So for your use case of excluding a specific user set as the Assignee you would want to use the NOT EQUALS operator which would be "!=" so the query would be something like the following to show all issues not assigned to the currently log in user:

assignee != currentUser()

Then to switch to the opposite you would need to have a secondary filter of:

assignee = currentUser()

BUT you would need to deselect the first filter before selecting the second filter otherwise you would be searching for issues where the user is both "Equal to" AND "Not Equal to" the same user producing a logic conflict and basically be returned as the following and have no results returned:

(assignee != currentUser()) AND (assignee = currentUser())

Also a protip on using the NOT IN or != operators, in filter results:  These exclusionary filters will only return values where a value is present in the field and will not show any issues where the field is NULL.  So in your example, if you are looking for just issues that have an assignee but excluding a the single user your good to go, but if you're looking for issues that are not assigned to anyone as well as issues not assigned to a specific user I recomend adding in an OR operator for empty, like this:

assignee != currentuser() OR assignee is EMPTY

Regards,
Earl