Find the name of parent folder/group in a structure

[Paul Doman]

I have a structure in which the issues are added by linking, and grouped according to a formula. The formula uses attributes of children. 

Within a group, I need to use formulae to make decisions about the children of issues based on the (derived) name of the group. 

The challenge is that there are many-to-many relationships, so that I cannot link back from a child to see its parent because there can be more than one parent, and the business logic I need to apply depends on which parent issue has led me (the structure) to include it in a particular (derived) group.

I'd be interested in suggestions on this topic. Thanks in anticipation.

Paul

[David Niro · Accepted solution]

Hello @Paul Doman ,

Do I understand correctly, that you have some issues in your structure and that you have then grouped them based on some criteria where each issue can be under more than one group?

Group A
  issue 1
  issue 3
  issue 4
Group B
  issue 1
  issue 2
Group C
  issue 3
  issue 4

And that now, at the issue level, you want to see some other calculation that uses the specific Group the issue is under?

Could you describe what you are trying to do exactly?  I think it should be possible.

Best,
David

[Paul Doman]

Hello @David Niro 

Thanks for considering this requirement. The essence of it is indeed as you have shown, where any issue can be part of more than one project.

The diagram shows the actual Structure arrangement:

Projects (AR-1387, AR-1352 etc) are grouped by domain (AUBH, AUHG, AUHR..), which is not itself an attribute. The domain is meaningful for the summary/title of the issue, and it is derived by formula from the summary of the "AR" issue.

Then, the projects are grouped by domain (formula).

My requirement is to be able to access that domain (AUBH) to execute formulae for each of the issues (in your example, Issue1, Issue 4; or in the screenshot TC-379534, TC-379942 and TC-379122). For these issues, I must get an answer of "AUBH" because that is the context I need. If any of those three issues is also in AUDH, AUHG, AUHR or AUNG then those values are not the correct context.

However, if TC-379942 happens to be in a project for domain AUNG, executing one of the desired formulae must return the context/value "AUNG", not AUBH. This is from the point of view of the particular instance of TC-379942 "looking up the tree".

I have throught about using some form of "ParentOf()" function but suspect that they would rightly return all parents, not just the context that I need.

Hope this helps your deliberations

Kind regards

Paul

[David Niro]

Hello @Paul Doman ,

You're very welcome, and thank you for the additional context!

Please try:

PARENT#level=2{summary}

Since the value you want is the summary of the Group, and from what I can see the level of the group is 2 in your hierarchy, it should work for you.

More information on the PARENT{} function and #level modifier.  Please let me know if it helps!

Best,
David

[Paul Doman]

Thanks for that tip, David.

Very elegant, and works as required. Another problem solved, and I will explore the function further.

Kind regards

Paul

[Joachim Goehl]

I wanted to compare the property of an Item with the Group Folder Name - which is created base on that property, but we allow manual adjustments; which unfortunately overwrite the grouping. As a result the manually adjusted item is not automatically put into another group when the property is changed.

When using #level=2 the result was changing when I switched Automation Editing Mode on and off.

So I went with the help you linked (many thanks therefor, because I did not find that information myself when I searched for parent within the help).

• PARENT#level=-1{} extracts the value from the parent row (same as PARENT{}) 
• PARENT#level=-2{} extracts the value from the grandparent row
• PARENT#level=1{} extracts the value from the root row

The "-1" worked perfecty in my case.

[Dana Meir]

is there the same for the second direction? I tried :

CHILD#level=1{}

but got an error

[Joachim Goehl]

Not sure what you are trying to do - because parent there is one, children there can be many.

is this what you were looking for?

VALUES#children{summary}

replace "summary" by the desired property you want to show

[Mor Alush]

Hi, I have 2 bugs, that one is duplicate root cause of the other. (let's call them parent child)

the child has state reason "root cause" and the parent state reason "in progress" 

I want to create a formula that if the child has state reason "root cause" then the parent have a new value of "root cause" 

with the formula of parent#level=-1 it returns for the child "in progress"  and I want the opposite direction ( I want to return the child's value for the parent)

[Joachim Goehl]

Not sure if I understand your quetion right, but as I wrote above, with 

VALUES#children{summary}

you can check the child(ren) properties. Try this:

IF(values#children{status}="root cause",values#children{status},item.status)

If all children values are "root cause", the parent will adapt this status. else via item.status it will keep its own status. if the children have multiple status conditions, it will not adapt the parents status - e.g. if you have one children in status root cause and one in progress.