Filter query to show all epics with their summary containing text "PDP" and all their child tasks

[Munir Patel]

Would appreciate if someone can guide me to create a JQL query to display all EPICs containing text "pdp' in their Summary and also bring in all the Child Tasks for these epics

[Mikael Sandberg]

You would need an app from the Marketplace in order to do this. I know that JQL Tricks, Enhanced Search can do this because they extend default JQL. You can also have a look at JXL, that app can also get you the result you are looking for.

[Trudy Claspill]

I concur. Such a filter cannot be constructed with only native Jira filter capabilities. 

Besides the apps that @Mikael Sandberg mentioned, another one that would work is Scriptrunner Enhanced Search which provides the issuesInEpics() function

https://docs.adaptavist.com/sr4jc/latest/features/scriptrunner-enhanced-search/scriptrunner-enhanced-search-jql-functions/links-and-relationships#issuesinepics

Example:

issuetype=Epic and summary~"PDP" or issuefunction in issuesInEpics("issuetype=Epic and summary~'PDP'")

[Munir Patel]

Thanks Mikael and Trudy for the response

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @Munir Patel,

unfortunately, this is trickier than one might think; as a hierarchical query, it would really require some kind of "join" or "subquery", which isn't available in plain Jira/JQL.

A few directions forward:

• If it's a one-off thing, you could first query the relevant epics, and then use the keys of these epics in a second query, in an "parent in (KEY-1, KEY-2, ...)" clause.

If you want to run your search dynamically, without manually "stitching" two queries together, you'll need extra tooling:

• You might be able to use Jira Automation to propagate epic information down to the epic's children, and then use the respective field(s) on the children to include them into your filter. Obviously, this will add a fair bit of complexity to your system.
• There's different apps from the Atlassian Marketplace that can help with that. First, there's a number of apps that extend JQL by additional functions, including hierarchy-related functions. Scriptrunner and JQL Search Extensions have been mentioned above.
• Alternatively, you could try one of the more hierarchy-focused apps from the Marketplace. These apps typically have their own ways of figuring out parent/child relationships between issues, and provide more powerful ways of searching through issue hierarchies. I myself work on such an app, in which your use case would be easy to solve - I'll provide more details below.

Hope this helps,

Best,

Hannes

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

... and to expand on the last point, this is how this would look in the app that my team and I are working on: JXL for Jira. Put simply, you'd create a sheet with all issues that are potentially relevant to you, enable the default issue hierarchy (that's just one click), and then use JXL filtering capabilities to narrow down to the issues that you care about:

Once you have your list of issues, you can work on these directly in JXL (much like you'd do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets), trigger various operations in Jira, or export them for further processing.

Any questions just let me know!

[Prosper Agwegiokhe]

Hi @Munir Patel

I'm Prosper, a Support Engineer at Appfire, and I'm here to assist you.

If you're open to a plugin suggestion, I recommend trying our app, JQL Search Extension for Jira.

You can use the following query to return epics summary containing the word "PDP" and their children

issue in childrenOfEpicsInQuery("text ~ 'PDP'") or issue in epicsOfChildrenInQuery("") and text ~ PDP

For more details on this query, you can refer to this resource or reach out to our support team. We're happy to help!

Best regards,
Prosper

[Munir Patel]

Thanks Prosper for the response