How to filter for inward issues?

Question

Dear Community,

The Jira project I am working on is relatively large. Certain issue types should only be linked to defined other issue types. For example Epics should only be linked to System-, Functions-, Subtasks- and Defectissues. To control if the given structure is kept, I would like to set up a filter that shows all epics that are linked to other issue types that are not defined according to the given structure. Can you help me with this?

Thanks and best regards
Sebastian

Charlotte Santos -Appfire- · Answer

Hi @Sebastian Schwabe

I’m Charlotte, a support engineer at Appfire and I’m here to help you.

Unfortunately, using vanilla JQL, you’ll not be able to do it dynamically.

In the app where my team works, JQL Search Extensions for Jira, you can use this query to find epics that are linked to other issue types that are not the ones you mentioned above:

issue in linkedIssuesOfQuery("type not in (System, Functions, Subtasks, Defectissues)") AND type = Epic

Please contact our support if you have any other questions about this query.

We’ll be happy to help you!

Best regards,

Charlotte

Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Answer

Just to expand on the last point, this is how this would look in the app that my team and I are working on, JXL for Jira. Put simply, you'd create a sheet with all issues that are potentially relevant to you, enable the default issue hierarchy (that's just one click), and then use JXL filtering capabilities to narrow down to the issues that you care about:

(I'm using bugs here, but it would work with any other issue type(s) as well.)

Once you have your list of issues, you can work on these directly in JXL (much like you'd do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets), trigger various operations in Jira, or export them for further processing.

Any questions just let me know!

Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Answer

Hi @Sebastian Schwabe

Unfortunately, this is trickier than one might think; as a hierarchical query, it would really require some kind of join or subquery, which isn't available in plain Jira/JQL. I believe you'll need extra tooling for that.

* You might be able to use Jira Automation to "propagate" children information up to the epic, and then use the respective field(s) on the epic to query them. Obviously, this would add some level of complexity to your system.
* There's different apps from the Atlassian Marketplace that can help with that. First, there's a number of apps that extend JQL by additional functions, including hierarchy-related functions. ScriptRunner and JQL Search Extensions are popular ones, but there are others.
* Alternatively, you could try one of the more hierarchy-focused apps from the Marketplace. These apps typically have their own ways of figuring out parent/child relationships between issues, and provide more powerful ways of searching through issue hierarchies. I myself work on such an app, in which your use case would be easy to solve - I'll provide more details below.

Hope this helps,

Best,

Hannes