Clone child issues of Epic into other existing Epics

Question

I have multiple existing epics in a specified order created. The first epic has tasks created, again, in a specified order that I wish to clone into all the other epics that are created. How do I effectively do this without manually cloning each task multiple times?

All the solutions out these seems to copy the Epic and the tasks. Not just the task itself.

Luka Hummel - codefortynine · Answer

Hi @Mayuri Murugesu and a belated welcome to the community!

If you are willing to use a third-part app, you could try our Deep Clone for Jira.

With Deep Clone you can Bulk Clone your issues and use the Field Editor to select the Epic you want as a parent for the cloned issues for the Parent field.

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Mayuri Murugesu

You describe this:

I have multiple existing epics in a specified order created. The first epic has tasks created, again, in a specified order that I wish to clone into all the other epics that are created. How do I effectively do this without manually cloning each task multiple times?

Using an automation rule, the tasks can be cloned but it will not be possible to preserve the order of tasks cloned.  A person may need to manually re-rank the cloned issues to adjust the ordering.

The reason is rule branches which could be on more-than-one-thing process in parallel, apparently to help performance.  And so the last one could be added before the first one, and so on.  Please look here to learn more: https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-automation-branches/#Ordering-of-branch-executions

There are marketplace apps for cloning issues which may preserve the order; if you need that capability, please investigate those apps.

Kind regards,
Bill

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @Mayuri Murugesu

What event is going to cause the tasks to be cloned into the other Epics? Do you want to trigger it manually?

The structure of the rule will depend on how it is triggered. You could use a rule like this:

Trigger: Manual (to be triggered from the source epic)
  Add a user input to get the Issue Key for the destination Epic

(optional: add Lookup Issue action to look up the issue key provided by the user
 and a Condition to confirm that it is found)
  Action: Lookup Issue
    JQL: issue=<user input> and issue type=Epic
  Condition: Advanced Compare
    First value: {{lookupIssues.size}}
    condition: equals
    Second value: 1

For Each: Related Issue
  JQL: parent={{issue.key}} order by Rank asc

Action: Clone issue
      include in the clone action the setting of the Parent field to the
      issue key the rule receives as input from the user.

I haven't tested this out fully, but it should clone all the issues from the source Epic and add them to the user input destination Epic.