How to order a list of issues by a date in the summary or description field?

[Ankit Patel]

Such a niche question, but we have a separate release management tool, and irritatingly when you register a release it creates a Jira ticket, then updates the title and the description (with all the dates and info etc, rather than using Jira  fields).

For example, if my release is called "release abc" and my team is "Bananas" and the release date is 1st December 2023, an issue is automatically created and mapped against it in Jira, and the title will be called "Bananas_01_12_release_abc".

how do I create a query which lists all the issues but specifically focuses on "01_12", then order by this? If it helps, there's a consistent description where it says "release date = 01-12-2023". Would be fine if I could order by this description field too, somehow detecting the release date. 

it doesn't populate any specific field like "due date field" or anything like that.

tricky one but any help will be appreciated! Thanks!!

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Ankit Patel -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

This seems an example of the consequences of storing multiple pieces of information in the same field.

With out of the box features of JQL, I believe all you could do is search with the CONTAINS ~ operator if you know the exact release "date" expression.  And even that will not help when there are multiple years (e.g., 2023 and 2024) as the year is missing from the expression.

Ideally, could the release management tool send the entire release date in the summary, description, or better still a custom date field?  If it a complete date value, it could be extracted using an automation rule, placed in a date field, and then used for sorting.

Kind regards,
Bill