JQL - find all issues that are child of epics with custom field

Question

Hi all,

I have ~100 epics that have Custom Field = X, or Y or Z. I created a simple query that is listing all those epics that I want to see, there is no problem with that, but now I want to see all child issues of those epics. How can I do that?

I searched through multiple threads here but nothing was helpful :(

EDIT: Forgot to mention - Custom Field is a field that is present only on the Epic level, it is a dropdown with 3 possible choices.

I'm using JIRA cloud, I do not have any extensions installed.

Epics are spread through multiple Projects with various assignees, reporters etc.

Robert Rzad · Answer

Thanks!

You're right that it's not as easy as it sounds. Shame I might need some plugins for that but appreciate it nevertheless.

Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Answer

... and 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 the epic status here, but it would work the same way with any other field.)

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 @Robert Rzad

welcome to the community!

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.

A few directions forward:

* 
If it's a one-off thing, you could first query the relevant epics, and then use the keys of these epics in a second query, in a "parent in (KEY-1, KEY-2, ...)" clause.

If you want to run your search dynamically, without manually "stitching" two queries together, you'll need extra tooling:

* You might be able to use Jira Automation to "propagate" epic information down to the epic's children, and then use the respective field(s) on the children to include them into your filter. Obviously, this will add a fair bit 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. I've used JQL Search Extensions a few times and it works well.
* 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