How to previous "Initiatives" map to Levels above Epics in JIRA Portfolio Hierarchy Levels Beta

[Wes Mason [he / him / his]]

This question is in reference to Atlassian Documentation: Configuring hierarchy levels

I'm excited about allowing an arbitrary number of levels for JIRA portfolio, but I'd like to see the relationships between epics and higher-level items in JIRA itself.

For example, with these levels:

# | Level Name | JIRA Issue Types

1. Initiative | Initiative (Custom Type)
2. Epic | Epic
3. Story | All other standard issue types
4. Sub-Task | All sub-task issue types

How would a user in JIRA (outside of Portfolio) see the relationship between an initiative and all of its epics?

[Steven F Behnke]

My understanding currently is that there are no links. I hope we can define hierarchy links at some point as well that would correspond to the links in Portfolio plans.

In my usage we've been manually linking after the fact with Relates To but that gets tedious and error prone when it should be automatic. 

[Wes Mason [he / him / his]]

I'd love it to do automatic linking like stories are linked to an Epic. I was also thinking about manual links, but probably won't bother while this is in labs.

[Steven F Behnke]

My understanding currently is that there are no links. I hope we can defined hierarchy links at some point as well that would correspond to the links in Portfolio plans.