JQL - show Epics and their children in the same view (NO MARKETPLACE ADDON)

[Brian G]

I want a standard JQL query that shows epics and their children in the same results view: 

Epic 1

- Task 1

- Task 2

Epic 2

- Task 3

There should be an out of the box way to do this. In other words, I am NOT paying for an marketplace addon for this since this is such a basic thing.

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi Brian,

I can see that your are wanting to order the JQL results for both epics and issues in the epic in a hierarchical layout.  However it turns out that it's not possible to do this today in the case you have explained here.  I will try to explain more about why that is. 

The problem comes down to the way that JQL is sorting and ordering issues here.  You could try a JQL query such as

type=epic OR "Epic Link" is not empty order by "Epic Link"

This returns all the issues I think you want to see, but it will not order them in the manner you desire here.  Epics in Jira have a few special fields. Epic Name is one of these. This field only exist on the Epic issue type.  Conversely the Epic Link field doesn't actually exist on any Epic issue types in Jira.  While these fields are related in nature, since their actually different fields, we don't have a single field we can sort by that all these issues will have together.  Epics will have a Null value for the epic link, and all the issues in that epic also have a null value for the Epic Name field.  

While we can order by multiple fields, since the null values exists for either side of the first field to sort by, there just isn't a way to order these in that manner without the addition of other custom fields and some additional way to sync the values across the proper set of issues. 

Sorry there is not a clear solution for this today natively in Jira.  I created a suggestion that I believe could help here if implemented, please see JRACLOUD-73564.

Andy