How to add linked issues to bulk change

[Anna Konieczna]

Hi all,

I would like to ask if it's possible to add field "linked issues" to bulk change? 

Regards,

Anna

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anna Konieczna ,

I do not understand your question. What is "massive bulk" ?

[Anna Konieczna]

Hi @Jack Brickey , sorry my mistake: I mean bulk change: 

When I'm doing a bulk change, I would like to choose field "linked issues" but I can't see it.

Below you can see one piece of screen (but even down the page there is not available  field "linked issues" 

[Jack Brickey]

Thanks that was my guess. Unfortunately you cannot edit linked issues in bulk using Bulk change. I have read where others have used CSV import to accomplish this. There may be an addon that would help. Actually I just looked and found this - bulk-linker-server 

[Anna Konieczna]

@Jack Brickey I've installed Bulk Linker as you mentioned and now it's working! Thank you very much!

Regards,

Anna

[Ioannis D]

Hello @Anna Konieczna

You don't need an extra plugin for this. JIRA (from v8.13 onwards IIRC) is clever enough to understand what you are trying to do.

e.g. if you need to link 27 tickets to another (say as Resolved By).
You only need to compile the keys of all 27 JIRA tickets that you try to link, delimited by space.

Once you just click or move the focus out of the target text box, JIRA will render and prepare the links, as you can see below.

 
But you might have a more complicated use-case.

I hope that helps.

Best,
-ioannis

[Anna Konieczna]

Hi @Ioannis D seems to be good solution! Thank you for your explanation.

[Rabbit Stoddard]

So this used to work, but now it looks like when I copy/paste a list of such values, it now either clears, or tries to interpret the whole thing and one value, even with the spaces. Any ideas what happened to break this incredibly useful functionality?

[Anjana Ananth]

Thank you so much @Ioannis D

This worked perfectly fine for me just now for bulk editing 84 items. 

[Tony Sims]

What are you doing that we are not? I'm getting the same result as Rabbit.

[Daniel H. Kerr]

I experience the same as Tony Sims and Rabbit.  Tried explicitly typing whitespaces to delimit, tried generating them, tried different editors on 2 different OSs.

[Ioannis D]

Dear @Rabbit Stoddard @Tony Sims and @Daniel H. Kerr

You are right, sometimes it is not happening.
You need to follow these exact steps:

1. Open the link window
2. Copy/Paste the white-spaced list of your tickets that you want to link at the Issue text-box (e.g. "TICKET-12 TICKET-23 TICKET-34 TICKET-45", without the quotes)
3. Then click outside of the Issue text-box, e.g. at the Comment section.
   JIRA will automatically split the string and populate your tickets as if you have typed them individually.
   If you press [Tab] instead of clicking, this auto-completion is not happening.

I hope that helps,
-ioannis

[Daniel H. Kerr]

Thank you ioannis! I will try that and update.

[Rabbit Stoddard]

Yep, that helped. Thanks @Ioannis D! 

[Daniel H. Kerr]

Brilliant! That did the trick @Ioannis Drositis . Thank you!

[Rich Pixley]

Entering multiple keys doesn't seem to be working for me.  When I move focus it just takes one of the keys.

Looks like it's providing a drop down selector and there's no way to select multiples.

[Tony Sims]

This still doesn't work for me. Its things like this that make Jira only slightly better than using excel or a home made database. If I knew how many read blocks Jira created, I would have just written my own RDMS.

Buyer beware!!!

[Bijal Patel]

I am having hard time figuring out how to Open the link window? Please advice, thank you!

[Jack Brickey]

I am not sure what you mean by link window. However, the presentation for linked issues has changed since this post. Today If you open an issue you will see this...

[Bijal Patel]

@Jack Brickey Perfect, thank you. I was able to change attached links to multiple tickets.

[Charles Wernlund]

For what it's worth, you can also copy/paste with carriage returns seperating the issues.

I did an issue search, than exported as a CSV, copied the exam keys I wanted to link, and pasted that column into the link field, clicked outside the field box so JIRA formatted it, and violla, we have our bulk links.

[Jarosław Solecki _Deviniti_]

We created the free plugin for bulk link action to resolve the problem with bulk linking - Issue Link Manager.

I hope for your feedback after trying it. 



Best regards, 
Jarek