Automated update of Epic custom field

Question

Hi All,

I'm looking for a bit of help regarding automations of custom fields on an epic

A bit of context about this, I created a kanban board where the manual creation of an EPIC drives the auto creation of a TASK, then subsequently the transition of that task to DONE then drives another auto creation task and so on.

So the epic is the parent of the 1st task. The 1st task is the parent of the 2nd task etc.

I am looking to be able to write some automations which will auto populate plain text custom fields within the original epic for that task chain which related to the status of the task itself.

For instance, when a task is transitioned to DONE. I then want the epic issue to have the plain text custom field reflect that status and read 'DONE'. Likewise when the task is transitioned to in progress, and when it's initially created and automatically put in To Do.

I have tried a few different ways but I can't seem to get it to work.

I have tried adding in a branch within the automation I already have which generates the subsequent task.

I have also tried setting up a separate rule which looks for when a task is transitioned, and has a summary field containing a certain name then it will update the epic field for that task name accordingly. I cant get these to work at all, even with the help of Chat GPT.

Please see the screenshots below which show my attempts at the automation, along with the flow of task creation for reference (each grey arrow shows when a new issue is auto created.

Example.
When build tree / ref edge TASK is transitioned to DONE and subsequently created the fitting stage review TASK, I would like to be able to then update the plain text field (called Build tree ref edge) within the original EPIC to either say 'DONE' or display the week number of the year or even todays date.

The goal of doing this is then to be able to report each individual task that is against that epic with the current status of that particular task

All help greatly appreciated!

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Thanks for the additional information, and...

I have no recent eazyBI experience; thus perhaps another community member will provide suggestions.  My understanding is one could read the changelog information for work items and use that to report as you show, or combine the information from the Epics and their child issues using the keys to join them.

Assuming you continue with your current approach, your rule could use a series of if / else conditions to identify the correct text field to update in the parent Epic.  Although that approach may not scale or be easily maintained when the child issues of the Epic change...thus potentially impacting your eazyBI reporting.

Gary_9tc86x · Answer

Hi @Bill Sheboy

Thanks for the reply. I am fairly new to jira with no formal training etc so I am just trying to pick it up as I go along.

My goal is to create an EazyBI report which will have the epics on the rows and the individual tasks as the columns. The report should then show the status of each individual task eg TO DO, IN PROGRESS, DONE. I built the board before I realised management had a specific need for granularity reporting. Or I would've used the component field as a way of filtering the tasks, but now as I haven't done that and the kanban board has been kicked off with many tasks already completed or underway I need to find another way. I would like the report to look similar to the below screenshot of an excel tracker we have for these tasks. I want to eliminate this tracker by reading it off an EazyBI report on a jira dashboard.

So I had plain text custom fields added to the EPIC with the names of each individual task. And I am attempting to write an automation for when a task transitions from one status to another the custom field on the epic relevant to that task would be updated with the appropriate text to identify the status.

I am hoping with these being actual fields within the EPIC then it will now let me use those as columns on EazyBI (FYI: I have zero experience with eazybi). I just can't get this automation to run for whatever reason. For the separate automation in the screenshot in my first message called In Progress UPDATE, the audit log doesnt show an error when I transition the task. It only shows 'No Actions Performed'

This shows the field I attempted to update still showing as 'Test' (which I manually entered) as opposed to 'In Progress'.

If there is another way to get the EazyBI report to show what I need it to show rather than using this automation I'd be happy with that. Do you know of any other possible way? I am still curious to find out what I am doing wrong that this automation won't work.

Kind regards,

Gary

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Gary

What would the contents of that custom field look like for some example issues?

For example, are you trying to create a "log" of the status changes for the Tasks which are children of the Epic, perhaps like this:

Task ABC-123, In Progress on 29 April 2025 8:00AM; Task ABC-123, Done on 30 April 2025 2:00PM; ...

If so, you could concatenate on the new values when they happen:

* action: edit issue (for the branched-to Epic), setting the field to:

{{issue.customfield_12345}}; {{triggerIssue.key}} transitioned to {{triggerIssue.status.name}} on {{now.jqlDateTime}}

If not...

What is not working as you expected?  Perhaps include more example information and images of the audit log details to provide more context.

Kind regards,
Bill