Automatically update subtask value after editing the mother field

[Simon Sahli]

Hi Atlassian fam,

following situation, we have a template in place that creates like 15 subtasks for a specific use-case, which works well.

It can sometimes happen that after the subtask already has been created a field on the mother task needs to be changed. So the customer clicks on "edit" and updates the relevant manually to the right value. It is a dropdown field that is linked to Tempo accounts.

Currently, when updating this dropdown value for the Tempo account on the mother task, their 15 children do not get updated automatically. It can be done manually of course, but sometimes people forget to do it, which can be a problem, and moreover these values on the mother and their children should ALWAYS be the same.

My question:
Is it possible that everytime when this kind of mother task gets edited and the value of the Tempo dropdown gets changed the value for this field for all the children gets updated as well?

We are still on Jira Server for a couple of month and therefore we only have the "Legacy automation" available...

Kind regards,
Simon

[Mark Segall · Accepted solution]

Hi @Simon Sahli - If you have Automation for Jira Server, you could do something like this:

• TRIGGER: Field Value Changed (Your field)
• BRANCH (Sub-Tasks)
  • ACTION: Edit Issue (Your field)
  • Select the elipses to the right of the field
    • Copy from
    • Parent

[Simon Sahli]

Hi @Mark Segall

thanks for your input. When I go into the legacy automation menu of the project and create a custom rule I cannot find your "Field Value Changed" trigger.
I can only see the following triggers, which do not really help for this use-case:



Does this mean that with my current Jira Server version I cannot do want or is there another way?

/Simon

[Mark Segall]

Ahh... Yes that is a more limited version of Jira automation.  I'm not sure it's possible.  It's important to note that Jira Server is going end of life in Q1 2024 so you probably should think about migrating to either Jira Cloud or Jira Data Center.  Both offer more robust automation capability.

[Simon Sahli]

We are in the first phase of the migration, the assessment phase. We want to be on Cloud sometimes in October 2023, so we are not that far away!

I have a list of things that we want to do after the migration to Jira Cloud is completed, therefore I will put this task on this list as well.

[Simon Sahli]

@Mark Segall : Follow-up question on this topic!
Since it is not possible to do this automation until we are on Cloud, I was wondering if I could check with a JQL if the value of the mother and the children issues differs.
So basically check the value of the mother and if their children have not the same value then display them otherwise don´t.
My idea is to have a subscription on this filter and let it run daily so that people know that they need to update the children manually.

Do you know if this query is possible with JQL? And if yes, could you provide an example please?

Thanks in advance!

[Mark Segall]

Unfortunately no (at least not natively).  This would require JQL to perform the equivalent of a SQL JOIN and JQL unfortunately isn't that robust.  

This might be possible with a marketplace app offering JQL extensions, but I'd need to defer to someone else with more experience in these apps if it is possible.