Is it possible to copy a mandatory field value from Epic to child on creation?

François Dumas

I have the following requirement:

• On Issue creation
• If the issue is linked to an Epic and "custom field A" is empty
• Set the new issue's "custom field A" value to the Epic's "custom field A" value

This is because in 95% of the cases, child issues should have the same value for "custom field A" as their parent, unless specified otherwise.  Automating this process would save a lot of unnecessary data entry.

This is a fairly straightforward task that can be accomplished by an Automation and I can find plenty of examples of this on the web (for example this Jira Software Cummunity Question ).

However, my problem is that "custom field A" is mandatory, and the Issue Creation sequence of event does not seem to allow for this, i.e.:

• My automation starts with the trigger "When: Issue created"
• I thought the trigger might fire before the "mandatory field check" is performed, but it seems it is done after, therefore the Issue won't be created unless the user sets a value for "custom field A", meaning my automation never fires...

I know I could either:

• Make that field optional
  • But I can't do that because it could end up empty on issues created without an Epic
• Or make that field optional AND the Epic link field mandatory
  • However, I don't want to to that because there are a lot of ad-hoc "floating tasks" in our projects and forcing all of them to be under an Epic would be counter productive. 

Is there a way I could satisfy this requirement?  Any help will be greatly appreciated, thanks! ☺

Alex Koxaras -Relational-

Hi @François Dumas 

What I'm thinking is that you could possibly achieve this with an app, and via workflow automation (rather than JA). E.g. with JMWE:

• You could add a validator on the create transition., that the "custom field A" must not be empty IF an epic doesn't exists or if the epic link is empty (this will satisfy your requirement of having the field mandatory during issue creation)
• Then you would add a post function to copy the value of "custom field A", only if an epic exists (this will satisfy the copying the value requirement)

I think that this could satisfy both your requirements. With jira automation the problem is that it's actually a listener and wait for the event to be fired. But the event fires on the create transition. So this should be your main focus of work.