Auto-recategorize all children after changing EPIC category

Maartendirickx

I'm trying to categorize all children of an EPIC in a Jira Work Management (Team Managed). Actually, I want color-coding and only Categories offer this feature as far as I understand.

The hierarchy is Epic> {task,purchase,bug} > subtask. The epic gets a category and this should flow through to all newly created items with that epic.

Is there any way this can be achieved?

I couldn't figure out how to automate that on creation, and I went for a work-around: Say I have created 15 new tasks for epic proj-123. I change the category of proj-123 and automate that those children get updated. 

That boils down to:

• Trigger: field value change for Category
• Branch: for all the issues in the Epic
  • Action: edit the Issue fields, copying it from the triggering issue.

I used the JSON:

 

{
"fields": {
"Category": "{{triggerissue.Category.id}}"
}
}

Unfortunately, this fails with:

Edit issue
Error editing issues
PROJ-999 (Specify a valid 'id' or 'name' for Category (customfield_10033))

 

Any help is kindly appreciated

Bill Sheboy

Hi @Maartendirickx -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Unfortunately, there are now at least 3 fields named "Category" in Jira projects, of which the field for team-managed, business projects is only one. 

Selecting it from the Edit Issue action field dropdown does not work (and shows the JPD Category field for my site).  Here is the open defect for that symptom: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AUTO-803

I also tried the "fields" format for the JSON edit and that did not work.  The work-around is to use the custom field id and the longer "update" format for the JSON edit.

{
  "update": {
    "customfield_10064": [
      {
        "set": {
          "id": "{{triggerIssue.customfield_10064.id}}"
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

That is the custom field id for my site.  To find the custom field id for your field, please use this how-to article with an example issue from your business project: https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/find-the-smart-value-for-a-field/

Kind regards,
Bill