Jira automation to clone an issue hierarchy

[Darrel Jackson]

I've seen a few discussions on this topic but without any definitive answers.

I'm trying to write an automation rule to clone an issue and all of it's children at any level in the hierarchy.

The use case is a lot of my teams want to template work by creating exemplars in Jira then cloning the whole issue hierarchy. This is fine if it's just Task -> Sub-task or Epic -> Task however Epic -> Task -> Sub-task is hard as automation only lets you have one level of branching. And if you add a level above Epic, say "Initiative", cloning Initiative -> Epic -> Task -> Subtask is even harder.

I know there are marketplace apps like DeepClone but they are prohibitively expensive for this use case and this is a problem that feels easily solvable in Jira Automation if you know the right way to solve it.

Does anyone have any automation rules to share or ideas on how it would work?

[Marc - Devoteam · Accepted solution]

Hi @Darrel Jackson 

This is possible with 2 automations then can be triggered on another automation.

The issues is that you will run in to issues.

The most like issue you will run in is that the first rule that will clone all child issues from an Epic, this needs to be run in a branch in a rule is not finished executing.

The other rule you would need and that needs to option set that the rule can be triggered by another rule.

Is going to start to create your sub-tasks to the child issues created by the previous rule, based on the fact that the previous rule will not be finished on that time, you will be missing on issues you would expect to be created.

That is the reason why all member suggest to use a 3rd party app.

[Darrel Jackson]

Thanks for your insights.