Avoid useless issue links

[Frank Leinweber]

Jira allows for Linked Issues nearly all combinations of links. But many of that combinations are useless and should be avoided by configuration to make only valid issue links possible.

E.g. it's possible to set an Epic as "Issue Links - Child of" to a Story.

We spent many hours to find any possiblitiy to configure the Linked Issues fields to allow only specific (userfull) issue links for "Issue Links - Child of" and "Issue Links - Parent of", but so far we can only limit it by using a combination of scripts and features from several plugins. Seems that there is no real solution available for that problem - or I'm not able to find it.

Our preferred solution:  add a filter to the "Create Issue Links" item to select only specific issue types for linkage to my issue type. E.g. if my issue is an Epic I would like to see only issues of type Change Request, Problem Report and Business Epic as issues when using the "Issue Links - Child of".

Please help to find a solution - for us it's essential to get the right structure into our large scale project.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

Another idea. :-)

So, if you need to pre-filter the link types before the link actually gets created, then you could try that by implementing your filter logic in Javascript. That could go and find the link type selector control and remove the unwanted items from that. You should inject the JS to every screen where the user can create links.

[Frank Leinweber]

Do you have a reference where I can find some information how to pre-filter with JS and how to inject the JS to every screen. I'm not familiar with these things and need to learn... Thanks a lot for your proposals!

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

Pre-filtering is basically that you remove the unwanted items from the control. It is a very typical problem to solve in Javascript, so anyone with basic JS skills should be able to implement it. (Or search through StackOverflow.)

Injecting JS to Jira pages is usually done in one of two ways:

1. Run include the JS snippet in the announcement banner. Not very elegant, but works and doesn't require an extra app. Search for this!
2. There are apps to inject JS to Jira pages. This is more elegant, but requires the app. I'm not familiar with these apps, but this one would be the first I'd try.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

It seems that the vLinks app can restrict linking to the result set of a JQL. I'm not familiar with this app, but it sounds like it is worth a try.

(Easy Links could also help, but it doesn't support Jira Cloud as far as I see.)

[Frank Leinweber]

vLinks creates a custom field with another issue link type. We are asked to use the "Issue Links - Child of" and "Issue Links - Parent of" as these are the standard elements used by the Structure and other Jira plugins. I've created a customer field with a singel issue picker plus filter configuration but at the demo it wasn't accepted - as it is not the standard. Meanwhile we tested to use the customer field to select the specific issue type and then copy it to the "Issue Links - Child of" using ScriptRunner behavior but with that approach the customer field and the "Issue Links - Child of" need to be part of the screen (which is nonsense at the end).

When trying to set a new link the "Issue Selector", "History search",  "Create issue in epic", ... screens are visible showing all kind of issue types. How to configure such screen to show only specific issue types to link to - that would be the perfect solution.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

I'd try to create an event handler using ScriptRunner that is invoked "pre" creating the link and that vetoes if it finds a useless link type.

If that's not possible, then create a handler that is invoked "post" and that aggressively removes the useless link.

None of these are optimal from UX (both allow selecting a useless link type and only check after) and both require an app, but it is more than nothing and it is, at least, only one app.

[Frank Leinweber]

Hello Aron, thanks for your proposal. It's the same direction we tried to solve it but we expect that it won't be accepted by the users. To allow in the first step to create a link and then immediately to say that the link is useless incl. automatic removal of the just created link is something we will earn permanently derision from our developers.

I really wonder that the community of Jira users is working with this "all is possible" configuration that allows such unstructured relations between issues. Still hope that there is any solution to solve the topic immediately at the step of link creation - as proposed with a filter that shows only the issue types that are usefull.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

Hmm, I wrote another reply.