JQL to find issues in one Jira Cloud project that "block" issues in ANOTHER Jira Cloud project

Question

Notes:

* Org has no funding for add-ons (no ScriptRunner; no other add-ons).
* Org is on Jira Cloud.

Hi Community,
Use case: Need to use native JQL to find issues in many Jira projects that "block" issues in One Jira project. For example: ProjectA has work that is being done in many other Jira projects. The team wants to find all the issues in the other projects where they "block" any issue in ProjectA and the status changed during yesterday and statuscategory is not done. Note: All the blocking issues are not a child of an issue in ProjectA.

I cannot figure out how to get the bolded part of the JQL. I tried to use linkedissue in (Project A), but that only works with a specific issuekey (projecta-123), not only the project key =projecta.

HELP Community!!

Thank you.

Kristian Walker _Adaptavist_ · Answer

Hi April,

I can confirm that if you have the ScriptRunner for Jira Cloud or Enhanced Search for Jira (JQL & Subqueries) app then you can use the linkedIssuesOf() JQL function to write a query to find these issues.

A query to achieve your use case using linkedIssuesOf() would be similar to:

issueFunction in linkedIssuesOf('project = ProjectA', 'blocks') and project != ProjectA

I hope this helps,

regards,

Kristian

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Apryl Harris

The built-in JQL features do not support that type of query.

As you note, this is possible when checking one issue at a time using the linkedIssues function.  For example:

project != projectABCD
 AND issueLinkType = "is blocked by"
 AND issue IN linkedIssues("projectABCD-1")
 ORDER BY Key ASC

As you note no funding for marketplace addons to perform this type of search for all issues in a project, the possible workarounds depend upon how frequently you need this type of query:

* Need this one time* Export the issues in the project which have links of that time, including the links in the export.  Then use spreadsheet functions to identify issues which are not in the target project.

* Need this often* Use applications you already have (or build one) which can pull the data into other tools for periodic reporting using the REST API endpoints
* Use an automation rule, triggered on issue linking, to add an indicator to an issue when it is linked to an issue in a different project, and then use built-in JQL features to search on that indicator field.  I recommend against this approach as it will require a great amount of monthly automation usage limits and is error-prone if there are rule failures / outages or tampering with the indicator field.

Kind regards,
Bill