JQL query to get tickets in a project with a parent in progress

[Richard C_ Davis]

It appears that Epics are being replaced by Parents. Here's a screenshot:

It looks like all of my tickets have been modified to move the Epic value to the Parent field. That would be fine, except that I can't search for tickets with In Progress Parents like I used to be able to search for tickets with In Progress Epics. The following JQL query used to give me what I want:

project = DevOps AND "Epic Link" IS NOT EMPTY AND "Epic Status"= "In Progress"

What am I supposed to do now? I see that JQL can query based on "Parent Link" but not on "Parent Status".

Am I having a permission issue, or has this capability simply been removed from Jira?

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Accepted solution]

Hi @Richard C_ Davis

from what I understand, you actually want to query the children of the epics that are in progress. 

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 or JQL Search Extensions are popular, but there are others, too.
• 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]

Just 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!

[Richard C_ Davis]

Thanks @Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira. It looks like my memory is faulty and this was never as easy as I thought it was. I'll investigate these options and see if I can make any of them work.

[Jack Brickey]

Hi @Richard C_ Davis , 

So epic status still exists in the new world. At least it does for me currently. Keep in mind that epic status is not the same thing as the issue status. So epics fundamentally have two different statuses. When you mark an epics status to done it's not the same as setting the epic's "Epic Status" to done. I expect you may already know this though but I went to court here for thoroughness. 

[Jack Brickey]

As Hannes conveyed, If you wish to get the children of an In progress Epic that isn't possible with OOTB JQL. I am perplexed by your statement that the presented JQL worked for you previously. Could you please respond/elaborate?

[Richard C_ Davis]

Thanks @Jack Brickey. You helped me to see where I was confused. I haven't worked on this for a while, and the JQL I gave probably never worked. (I couldn't test it, since all of my tickets' Epic fields were converted to Parents, so I was digging into my memory.) @Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira is probably pointing me where I need to go.