JQL filter epics which cantain tasks with descriptions equal to and in status

[Christopher Barklem]

The company which I am working with have organised epics in the following way:

Issue is the Epic

Epic contains tasks per decipline such as UX, UI and Content which hold subtasks of the work pending, doing and done.

Once these tasks have all their subtasks done there is a task in the epic to assess the work prior to passing to development.

To show via a filter all Assessment tasks from epics which contain UX, UI and Content tasks where their subtasks are all in the status done requires a task peer query which I just cannot seem to get my head around.

In SQL it would be something like:

select * tasks with description = "Assessment" and (status = todo) IN the Epics IN this Project where the Epic tasks description = "UX", description = "UI" and description ="Content" (status = doing) contain all subtasks with (status = done)

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Christopher Barklem -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

JQL is not a SQL, and cannot perform many native functions such as nested queries, joins, etc.

Some work-arounds for your need depend upon how often you need this:

• Need just one time:
  • Manually run a query on the the child issues (with relevant criteria) to gather their Epic Links, and then convert that list in to a comma-separated values (CSV) list to search and find the epics, such as Key IN (epicLinkA, epicLinkB)
• Need sometimes:
  • Manually run queries to get the child issues and epics possible in scope
  • Export the results into a spreadsheet
  • Join the results using spreadsheet functions
• Need often:
  • Investigate the Jira marketplace for addons to enhance the features of JQL, or provide the reporting you need

Kind regards,
Bill

[Christopher Barklem]

Hi Bill,

Thanks for the information. I was wondering if it was possible to create saved filters and use them in JQL which might resolve some of the problem.

[Bill Sheboy]

Nope...

If JQL was a SQL you would be correct, but it cannot perform nested queries out of the box and so you cannot JOIN together the results of different queries.  The closest you get is AND or OR of the different result sets.

filter=12345 AND filter=67890

Again if you need this functionality often, the marketplace is the way to go for nested queries and JOINs.