How to search for epics with the string "[AN]"

Question

our organization puts all projects for a 3000 strong department into a single jira project.

So the single project contains roughly 500 teams, 4k active epics, one flow etc.

So that we have a chance of finding our projects 10 epics in the 4k active epics, we had the great idea of postfixing them with "[AN]".

However, when you try to search for epics with the string [AN] it says

The text query '[AN]' for field 'text' is not valid: probably your range query is incorrect.

I have also tried the following $$AN$$ etc.

If we search for "[AN]" as opposed to just [AN] in the issue search box, it actually finds all epics, it seems to be ignoring the brackets (its doing this in advanced:

issuetype = Epic AND text ~ ""[AN]"" <- this finds many unrrelated epics, not just those few with "[AN]" in the name (maybe its just looking for AN in the name).

Ay suggestions?

Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Answer

Hi @SH

just to add to @Jovin's answer: If you are open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, there are a number of options available that either extend JQL by additional functions (including text-search related function), or offer their own, non-JQL search and filter capabilities.

E.g., your use case would be easy to solve using the app that my team and I are 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 in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets. It's text search and filtering uses a different technology than JQL, meaning that you can use any special characters, like so:

For more advanced use cases, you can also use logical operators (AND, OR, NOT) or even regular expressions.

Once you've identified your issues, you can work on them directly in JXL (e.g., bulk edit them via copy/paste), or trigger various operations in Jira.

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes

Jovin · Answer

Hey @SH ,

This is due to the fact that special characters are not stored in the index: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwareserver/search-syntax-for-text-fields-939938747.html#Searchsyntaxfortextfields-escapingSpecialcharacters

You won't be able to search for them.

I'd suggest you re-identify them and use a label instead, or create a custom field. That way you could just use:

labels = AN

or

customfield_1011 = AN