Parent-Child relationship persists when issue type is changed

[Kate McLauchlin]

We use Jira Premium and I have set a custom hierarchy in which a newly defined ticket type, an 'Idea' ticket, is set at the same level in the hierarchy as an Epic. Distinguishing issue types in this way has been helpful so that Epics, and therefore what appears on the Basic Roadmap, only shows work that has been planned and committed to. We use the 'Idea' tickets to track discovery. Epics and Ideas are part of the same project but managed on different boards therein. Once an idea has been fully validated and the team has committed to delivering it, we change the ticket type from 'Idea' to 'Epic'. 

The issue that I'm running into is that there doesn't seem to be any easy way to create child tickets for an 'Idea' and have the relationship between parent and child persist when the issue type if changed to an Epic. 

Is there a setting that need to be changed on the custom "Idea' ticket? Will this parent/child issue be resolved with the planned release https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/upcoming-changes-epic-link-replaced-with-parent/ ? Is there any possible workaround for this challenge?

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

How are you currently creating the relationship between child issues and Ideas? When you look as the data for a child issue of an Idea, in which field do you see the Idea issue key?

You might be able to work around this by setting up an automation rule that is triggered when an Idea is changed to an Epic, and then doing a look up for the issues that have that issue's issue key in the field that stored it, and then updating the Epic Link field for those issues with that same issue key.

[Kate McLauchlin]

Thanks for your insight. I don't have a great solution for creating the parent-child relationship now. The best that I have come up with is to add a link between tickets and classify it as "is parent/child of". 

I like the idea of using automation. I'll look into that. 

I'm hoping that the updates Atlassian has been communicating re: removing or "epic link" and using "parent" for all levels of the hierarchy might solve the issue altogether. 

[Trudy Claspill]

Ah, yes, so you're using the generic linking functionality to make the relationship between the Idea and the "children". 

I think your rule would look something like this. Note I have not tested this out.

You might also want to consider if you want to remove the generic link between the parent and child issues since you are changing them to be linked through the Epic Link field.

[Kate McLauchlin]

Thanks! Automation worked to solve it!