Copying Jira ticket with automation loses elements

[Erin Lee]

My organization has a specific Jira project we use to hold ticket templates for tasks we repeat on a monthly basis. In some of them, I've used the Expand element to help clean up the issue's description. I've also included some action items in each section. An example of the issue is below:

I then set up an automation that creates the Epic and Children issues on the first of each month by duplicating the template.

However, when the automation runs, the issues that are created lose the Expand element and the Action Item formatting. The Action Item is turned into a bullet point, and the Expand is removed entirely:

Is there a way to maintain the Expand element and Action Item formatting when duplicating the issue? It seems like Jira should be able to copy its own formatting :(

Here's a screenshot of the automation, if that helps:

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Erin Lee 

Short answer: I hypothesize that is not easily possible, and it may be simpler to investigate marketplace apps for issue cloning which can support copying that formatting.

Since such formatting, including the relatively new "action items" were added, there have been many community posts that copying the formatting is not supported with either text markup or publicly available, REST API endpoints.  You can find community posts where people are trying undocumented information with Atlassian Document Format (ADF) to copy things like action items, doing so with the REST API to read / write rather than using the Clone Issue action.  However there are no guarantees those techniques will continue to work in the future.

Kind regards,
Bill