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Jira Cloud Automation - link Task and Subtask

Sav Cent

Hi,

i've created an big automation rules that's create Story/Task/Subtask on Epic creation:

2026-04-23 17_13_08-Greenshot.png

I link story on Epic with filds Parent -> Work Item

but i don't find how to create link for task to story, subtask to story and subtask to task.

Please, Someone could help ?

regards

Accepted answers

Sav Cent

Hi,

thanks for your help. the only way i found is to separate the creation of all the issues.

rule 1 creation on creation of epic, create the three story (add parent link to the story)

rule 2,3,4 on transition of each story from to do to in progress, create task and sub task. (on each task/subtask, add parent link to them)

All comments

Trudy P Claspill

Hello @Sav Cent

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

In a subtask the Parent field is also used to specify specify the parent item for the subtask.

Regarding the link of task to story, the native Jira work item hierarchy does not support that. The native hierarchy is

Epic
|-- standard work item types
    |-- subtask work item tupes

Items from the same level cannot be parents/children of each other. They are siblings. Have you customized the work item type hierarchy configuration in the global settings to change that?

You could use the generic issue linking to link a task to a story. That would not be seen by Jira as a parent/child relationship.

M Chandra Shekar

what @Trudy P Claspill mentioned it’s absolutely correct. Same level work items we can’t use parent - child. What I can additionally suggest you that you can create custom link types (is parent of) and (is child of) Those you can use in your automation to link Task to story.

Sav Cent

Hi,

thanks for your help. the only way i found is to separate the creation of all the issues.

rule 1 creation on creation of epic, create the three story (add parent link to the story)

rule 2,3,4 on transition of each story from to do to in progress, create task and sub task. (on each task/subtask, add parent link to them)

Stephen.Lugton

Hi @Sav Cent

It's good to see you've found a solution, for future use you can consider using smartvalues

e,g,

You can then create your story and smart value:

Then you can use that smart value as the parent for any subtasks you create to go with that story:

And any tasks you want linked to that story can be linked using JSON in the additional fields under more options:

If you want to create subtasks for that task, just create a new variable and use that in the sub-task parent field.

Overall your automation would be something like:

Olga Cheban _TitanApps_

Hi @Sav Cent , and welcome to the Community!

I wanted to offer an alternative approach that's more straightforward to set up. Instead of chaining multiple automation rules to recreate the same Epic → Story / Task → Subtask structure each time, you can save the whole hierarchy as a reusable issue template.

This can easily be done with our solution, Smart Templates for Jira. It lets you save the full Epic with its child Stories, Tasks, Subtasks, and checklists as a single template. When you apply it, the whole hierarchy is created at once with all parent-child links already in place. You can also pre-fill fields, set assignees per work item type, and use Smart Variables to handle the parts that change each time.

It's way more transparent than handling this with multiple automation rules.
Here's an example of such a template. In this case, it's an epic with tasks and checklists for recurring competitor analysis, but it can be any work hierarchy with any structure.

The solution pairs well with Jira Automation too. If you want automation to kick things off, you can trigger the template application from a rule and let Smart Templates handle the structural part. If you want to generate these epics on a schedule, you can use Smart Templates' built-in Scheduler with an intuitive UI.

Smart Templates - Schedule.png

I hope this helps!

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