How to make project keys incremental for sub-tasks

[Jessica Nash]

Hi I have a project set up with a project key 'ABC' so that tickets are created as ABC-1, ABC-2, etc.

I would like to make sub-tasks have incremental project keys (so if I create a sub task to ABC-2, it is something like ABC-2-1 rather than ABC-3.  

Is there any way to configure this (I am not a developer).

Thanks

[Warren · Accepted solution]

I don't believe so - as far as I'm aware it is an auto-increment that Jira uses and we have no control over it.

I can see why you may want this, but possibly it's worth investigating what you're really trying to achieve. There may be another of getting to what you're after.

So .... what is the end goal of you wanting that numbering?

[Walter Buggenhout]

You could also use the issue type Epic for your larger tasks, rather than create seperate Jira project every single time you need to complete more than 1 task to complete your mission.

An epic is an issue type that acts as a parent to other tasks. These tasks don't need to be subtasks. It doesn't solve your numbering request, but will create less overhead than creating separate projects every time.

For referencing your external issue references, you could also set up a custom field in Jira where you include the link. As Warren said, the issue key in Jira is like a (structured) ID. through a custom field, you can freely enter your linking information as you desire.

[Jessica Nash]

Okay great - that should be a good workaround then!  Thanks so much :-)

[Warren]

Pleasure, please mark as Accepted if you're happy

[Jessica Nash]

Hey thanks for replying.

I'm trying to get them to match up to references we use internally (the reference numbers are automatically generated using a different system) and if I create sub-tasks everything goes out of sync!

Most of our internal jobs only need one Jira ticket but some of them need to be broken down to sub-tasks as they are larger projects.  I could create a separate project for each of these larger jobs and then link them to the 'master' ticket in the main project (I'm assuming that you can link tickets across projects and can also pull tickets from multiple projects into a single Kanban board)?

[Warren]

Hi Jessica

Yes, tickets can be linked to each other. Also, you can have tickets from multiple projects showing in a board. A board can show project tickets, or it can show the results of a filter (JQL query), so you could have a Kanban board which uses a query which shows precisely what you're after.