Excluding issues with subtasks in JQL

[Russell Howe]

The answer may well be "don't do that" but it seems like a legitimate use case to me.

We have an issue type ("Job") which allows subtasks ("Tasks"), but which do not always have subtasks.

We set time estimates on the subtasks, but if there aren't any subtasks (it is a straightforward job which doesn't need breaking up into components) we just set a time estimate on the Job itself.

I would like to query for all issues which should have a time estimate but don't, i.e. "All Jobs and Tasks except Jobs which have subtasks" or "All Tasks and also Jobs which don't have subtasks". I'm trying to avoid creating a separate issue type for the "simple job"s

My JQL looks like this currently:

project = MyProject and issuetype in ("Job", "Task" ) and status not in (resolved, closed) and fixVersion in unreleasedVersions() and timeestimate is empty

[Federico Rela]

issuetype not in subtaskIssueTypes()

[pelizza]

Great answer, but not for this question 

By the way, it helped me on another situation...

[Jeret Shuck]

Great answer! First click, first thing that worked for me. 

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

JQL Tricks plugins has a hasSubtasks method which you can use in this query. It is a commercial plugin, btw!

[Russell Howe]

Yeah, I saw that. This isn't a problem which is worth any money to me, unfortunately.