JQL "not in" operator

Kevin Edwards December 30, 2014

I have a project with 654 issues. The product owner has tagged 105 of those issues with a certain keyword, with "keyword(s)" being a custom field on our local JIRA instance that accepts any space-delimited string. (Please don't ask why we don't just use the JIRA "labels" field.)

This query returns the expected 654 results:

project = "MyProj"

And this query returns the expected 105 results:

project = "MyProj" and "keyword(s)" in (MyKey)

However, I can't seem to return the inverse, which should be the 549 issues without MyKey. The query

project = "MyProj" and "keyword(s)" NOT in (MyKey)

returns 173 hits. Any ideas?

3 answers

1 accepted

4 votes
Answer accepted
Norman Abramovitz
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December 30, 2014

You are probably missing the issues without any keywords.  

("keyword(s)" NOT in (MyKey) OR "keyword(s)" IS EMPTY)

1 vote
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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December 30, 2014

I have some ideas around the fuzziness around using "in" on text, but a bit more testing might be useful.

Let's say two of the common words your users have put in this field are "Cat" and "Penguin".  Could you tell us what you get for:

project = "MyProj" and "Cat" NOT in (MyKey)

project = "MyProj" and "Penguin" NOT in (MyKey)

project = "MyProj" and "Cat Penguin" NOT in (MyKey)

0 votes
Kevin Edwards January 5, 2015

@Norman Abramovitz, that did the trick. Thanks.

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