When will the "Epic Link" and "Parent Link" fields disappear?

[Cristina]

Hello!

I would like to know when these fields will disappear and when the Automation or scripts that make use of the "Epic Link" or "Parent Link" will stop working and should be replaced by the "parent" field.

What will be the date of the final update?

Thank you!

[Andy Heinzer · Accepted solution]

It's difficult to give a straight answer to this because these kinds of changes happen in waves and stages.  And we monitor for feedback from customers in the initial rollout before continuing the rollout to all sites.  There is a rollout related to this that is happening last week that we announced per https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/blog/2023/11/atlassian-cloud-changes-nov-20-to-nov-27-2023#AtlassianCloudchangesNov20toNov27,2023-jira.software

My understanding is that this change from last week hasn't yet made it to all Jira Cloud sites.  We should have something more to report here by next week, unless of course something is unexpectedly delayed.  Which sometimes happens for changes like this.

Andy

[Jack Brickey]

Thanks for the update Andy.

[Bill Sheboy]

Thanks, Andy and Jack...Yes, and it would be good to get clarity on the disposition of this product change. 

Yesterday I tried answering a question on this same symptom, with this outcome: for me the "Epic Link" was empty and "parent" was populated, when seen from automation rules and the REST API issue functions.  Another Jira Cloud user had the exact opposite behavior.  Both were company-managed project issues.

Perhaps it would have been better to define a fixed, deprecation date for the fields, announced far in the future, and truly sunset them...removing all the ambiguity...and providing detailed instructions on finding all uses in saved filters and automation rules.

[Mark Ahnell]

@Andy Heinzer

I think the author wanted to know (and myself as well) is now that these changes have been rolled out, and currently "Epic Link" and "Parent" are living side by side in harmony, all my custom scripts are working just like they did, all good.  But, we really need to know when "Epic Link" will be permanently removed, so we know that these custom scripts need to be updated by X date.

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi @Mark Ahnell 

I could not find a set date for when the deprecated fields would stop functioning.  I reached out to my team that is managing this change.  They too cannot provide a set date at this time.

However they suggested that any scripts, JQL filters, automations, configuration, etc you might have been using "Epic Link" to switch them now to use the Parent field instead.

[Jack Brickey]

Hi @Cristina , I don’t recall seeing a timeframe on this just yet but I might have missed it. I have flagged this post to see if we can get someone from Atlassian to comment.