Remove completed epics from being searchable in "Epic Link" field

[Service]

Hi folks,

We use Jira Cloud with tickets categorized by epics, and we use the "Epic Link" field to assign tickets to those epics.

The "Epic Link" field searches epics that are resolved as "done", and there doesn't seem to be any way to filter them from search results. For example in the below screen clipping of the Epic Link field, "Payments Storefront" is an epic that has been closed, resolved as "done" and clicked "Mark as complete" in the epic panel, but it still shows up in our search results.

Is there a way to toggle whether resolved epics show in the search results? I understand that there is a use case for assigning tickets to closed epics without re-opening them, but for the vast majority of cases it's cumbersome to have epics accumulate in the search results indefinitely. 

Thanks!

[Kat Warner]

In Jira Server there is an Epic Status field that no one paid attention to for the longest time.

We had the same issue as you and resolved it by adding a post-function to update the Epic Status to Done whenever an Epic was resolved or closed. 

I then used bulk update to set the Epic Status to Done on Epics that were already resolved or closed. This cleaned up the Epic Link drop down significantly and we see a checkbox "Show Done Epics" in the drop down so we can still look for these when needed.

These same steps may work for you in Jira Cloud as well.

[Service]

I'll give it a try and report back, thanks a lot.

[Service]

Hi Kat. I tried your suggestion and it was a partial success. The problem now seems specific "New Issue View" associated with our Kanban board, (because Jira Cloud with a Kanban board now has a different issue views when issues are clicked on from a board than when issues linked directly).

In the traditional issue view, I tried your advice above and it works great (I marked epic status as 'done' and see the checkbox in the search). In the new issue view, the same Epic Link field seems to always search all epics, with no toggle.

So it seems like it might just be a missing feature of the new issue view.

[Kat Warner]

Glad I could help (partially).