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Get field value for sub-task from parent's epic

Rick Crow

I've scoured the posts here and more broadly and have yet to come up with a definitive answer as to whether it's possible to automate setting the value of a sub-task field by targeting a field in its parent's epic field. I understand that I can sync the value of an Epic's field to a story or other issue in that Epic so that it would be directly available to the story's sub-tasks, but I'm hoping I can avoid that and directly capture the value from the Epic to the sub-task.

Possible without third-party apps?

@Simmo ?

Accepted answers

Rick Crow

Thanks, all. Until the lookup action supports custom fields then, it looks like the answer to my original question is no, there is no way to directly access an epic field's value from a sub-task. My solution is now to copy the needed value from the epic to the parent issue of the sub-task so it can be accessed when needed.

All comments

John Funk

Hi Rick,

Can you give us an exact scenario? But I am hoping this can be done with Automation for Jira.

Rick Crow

Sure, John ... thanks for asking.

This is for a project that will have a set of repeatable tasks per client that will happen once a year. Each year our internal team prepares a presentation for the client visit. To support this, I've created a few date fields and one date 'offset' field that will be used to help calculate the due dates for each task.

Epics are used to represent the annual client visit. The Epic has an 'Earliest visit date' field. The individual tasks that need to be carried out to prepare the presentation for the annual visit are issues within that Epic. So far, I'm good ... everything is working. The trick is that some of these issues need to be further broken down to allow for multiple people satisfying the requirements for a single task and so sub-tasks come into play ... which also need unique due dates and therefore a calculation based on the 'Earliest visit date' field in its parent's Epic.

So:

Epic: 'Earliest visit date' field
Task: 'Visit task offset' numeric field used with 'Earliest visit date' field in Epic to calculate individual task 'Due date' field.
Sub-task: Same as Task ... same fields and calculations, but now the 'Confirmed visit date' field is not in the direct parent.

Of course, I could also just avoid the use of sub-tasks and repeat the appropriate tasks (n) times with a modified/extended summary field to differentiate them, but I'd prefer to leverage sub-tasks to keep things cleaner at the primary task level.

Rick Crow

In case it's helpful, here's what I'm using to do the magic between the tasks and epics (modifying the task due date field):

{{issue.epic.Earliest visit date.minusBusinessDays(issue.Visit task offset)}}

This, of course, doesn't work ... but it illustrates what I'd like to accomplish with the sub-tasks:

{{issue.parent.epic.Earliest visit date.minusBusinessDays(issue.Visit task offset)}}

Bill Sheboy

Hi @Rick Crow

When do you create the sub-tasks, with the task creation or at some later timeframe?

And, have you confirmed the names of the smart values match your custom fields? (Sometimes they are different and so the custom field ID is needed.) To find those, try the steps in this article: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/find-the-smart-value-for-a-field/

Regardless of when you create the sub-tasks, you could use a branch to the epic to capture the "Earliest visit date" in a created variable, and then do math on that to get what you need. A key thing is to convert the variable to a date before doing the math.

For example, if you create the variable and named it varEarliestVisitDate, you would use:

Kind regards,
Bill

Rick Crow

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