A Way to Revert Changes - Epics to Initiatives Cut Off Child Issues

[Melissa Pitney]

Our team recently changed many epics (that had child issues) to initiatives. In doing so, the child pages were cut off, meaning they no longer are attached to the parent issue.  We have thousands of child issues that are now orphaned. Anyone know of a way to revert this change? Otherwise it seems that we will need to go in and manually add parent issues.

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Melissa Pitney 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

I am not aware of any way to undo that change. There generally are no options natively available to "undo" an action in Jira.

This is one reason why it is always important to test changes on a small scale before executing them on a large scale.

In your particular case I am guessing that Epic and Initiative are at different hierarchy levels. Is that correct? i.e.

Initiative
|-- Epic
    |-- child issue

An issue's parent must be in the hierarchy level directly above it. So, if you change an issue from one type to another type that is at a different hierarchy level, it will no longer be allowed to continue being the parent of its children. In the above hierarchy, the issues at the "child issue" level can have only Epics as their parents. If you change an Epic to an Initiative, the Initiative can have only Epics as children, so the parent child relationship between the former Epic and its child issue will indeed be removed.