Why does adding an "OR" condition ignore the rest of my JQL?

Question

I have some fairly simple JQL that is behaving strangely and I can't figure out why. We have Initiative work items set to be parents of Epics, which are parents of Tasks and Stories.

I'm trying to create a filter that grabs an initiative and all its children. When I do something like this, where ENG-1 is a parent initiative with many children:

key IN (portfolioChildIssuesOf("ENG-1"))

I get returned a large quantity of work items. But when I try to include the top-level initiative ticket with something like:

key IN (portfolioChildIssuesOf("ENG-1")) OR key = "ENG-1"

the query returns ONLY ENG-1.

It's an OR condition - so shouldn't it be applying both conditions?

EDIT: An interesting wrinkle....

key IN(portfolioChildIssuesOf("ENG-1")) OR issuekey IN("ENG-1")

Returns both all child issues of ENG-1 and ENG-1 itself as expected. However, when I use ONLY either "key" or "issuekey" instead of mixing them, I get back only ENG-1.

I am starting to think this may be a bug.

Sam Rice_ffqem6 · Answer

Yeah, I think this in addition to my edit make it seem like there's either a bug or some kind of very weird setting in our environment causing this. Thanks for the follow up!

arielei · Answer

hello @Sam Rice

i tried your JQL and it works.

key IN (portfolioChildIssuesOf("ACC-5139")) OR key = ACC-5139

returns all child work-items of ACC-5139 and also ACC-5139 work-item.

Sam Rice_ffqem6 · Answer

Hi @arielei -  portfolioChildIssuesOf() returns a set of issue keys and "key = ENG-1" returns a boolean value. Per the docs, I don't think that's how the IN operator is meant to be used. I tried it just to be sure, but that also returns the JQL error I would expect:

Expecting ')' or ',' but got 'OR'. (line 1, character 43)