Can I filter to show child issues within any epic that has specific characteristics?

Question

My epics all have labels.  I would like to create a filter whereby I can show all child issues and epics that belong to an epic that has a specific label.  Such as: for any epics that have label = XYZ, then show the epic AND the children of that epic in my query results.

mauricio.groth · Answer

Hi @Beth Shamrock

As you're on Jira Cloud, the correct answer is to get an app that provides JQL extensions you're looking for.

With standard JQL, you can only get a list of issues and export them to Excel for further processing. This works if you want to do a one-off analysis. If your use case is more dynamic than that, look beyond standard Jira.

Standard JQL doesn't easily allow it, but you can quickly find the results using our professional indexing service JQL Search Extensions

You can use this query to find your children of epics whose epic contains "labels = XYZ"

issue in childrenOfEpicsInQuery("labels = XYZ")

Check out the documentation for more examples.

If you have any other questions, please contact our support. We’ll be happy to help you!
Best regards,
Maurício

Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Answer

To my second point, your use case would be easy to do with the app that my team is working on, JXL for Jira.

JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view for your issues that allows viewing, inline-editing, sorting and filtering by all your issue fields, much like you'd do e.g. in Excel or Google Sheets. It also comes with a number of advanced features, including support for flexible issue hierarchies. This means that you can easily navigate your issues, either as a simple list or across hierarchies, like so:

Once you've narrowed down to the issues you care about, you can work on these directly in JXL, trigger various Jira operations, or export them for further processing.

You may already know that you can trial any Marketplace app for free for 1 month, and depending on the size of your site, it may be free forever - so perhaps try out one or two apps and see which one works best for you.

Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Answer

Hi @Beth Shamrock

unfortunately, "plain" JQL doesn't work particularly well across issue hierarchies, so to the best of my knowledge, you can't do that without some kind of additional tooling.

A few ways forward:

* If you have Jira Premium, you might be able to do that using Advanced Roadmaps. AR shows your issues in hierarchy, and may allow you to filter down to the epics you care about. I haven't used AR myself in a while, so no guarantee that this actually works.
* If you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, there's a number of hierarchy-related apps that you could try. These apps have their own, often more powerful ways of dealing with issue hierarchies, and will definitively help with your problem. I can only speak for the app that my team is working on - JXL for Jira - but here it would be trivial. I'll add the details below.
* Alternatively, there's a number of apps that extend JQL by hierarchy-related functions. Scriptrunner and JQL Search Extensions are popular and IIRC have such functions.
* Finally, you could probably use Jira Automation to "forward" an epic label to the epic's children, so that you can just filter by the label. It obviously will require some scripting, and there's always a certain risk of inconsistencies, if a rule, for some reason, isn't executed or delayed.

Hope this helps,

Best,

Hannes