I need your help please in writing a jql query

[אלינור שריקי]

I have a field that only appears in epic and I want the query to show me all the stories that this field is not empty. I don't have this field in the story..

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @אלינור שריקי and welcome to the Community!

I am afraid I don't quite understand your requirement. If you don't have this field in your stories, you can be quite sure that it won't have any data in any stories. If the field isn't there, you can't fill it out.

In that case, you may just as well search for Issuetype = story AND parent = (ABC-3), where ABC-3 would be the key of an epic and the result would be a list of all stories linked to that epic.

Taking a very wild guess now - assuming that you would like to find all stories linked to any epic where this specific field is not filled out, you will run into the limitations of JQL, which is not very well equipped to handle this type of searches using subqueries. It does not support searching for a list of child or linked issues based on the result of another query.

You can then either add this field to your stories and use automation to make sure the field is copied over to your stories from their parent epic. Then, you will be able to simply search for the field just looking at the stories themselves. Or have a look at Market place apps that extend the out-of-the-box JQL functions.

Hope this helps! 

[אלינור שריקי]

Thank you very much! Can you explain to me what you meant to automate? Can I do an automation that will give me the value of the specific field in the story according to the field found in the epic linked to it?

[Walter Buggenhout]

With automation I am referring to creating an automation rule to copy fields from an epic to its child issues.

This sample rule from the template library is a good example of what I mean. It copies over the components from the epic to the child issue. There's two things you should do differently than in that sample rule: rather than checking if an epic exists in the 2nd step condition, use parent instead. And - obviously - copy the fields you want to sync across instead of the components.