How to Filter a Sibling Folder's Extended issues from another Folder in Structure using S-JQL?

[MH]

How can I filter out duplicate items from sibling folders in Structure while ignoring other non-sibling folders?  Any suggestions are welcome.  Here's my setup:

Highest level automation: 

Extend to add linked issues

Extend to add issues belonging to epics.

Folder: "Release 1.0"

   Folder: "Primary Scope"

      (manually insert top level items here and allow the automation above to extend to include children)

   Folder: "Candidate Scope"

      (manually insert top level items here and allow the automation above to extend to include children)

   Folder: "Misc Automated"

      Automation under the folder to insert all items with the Fix Version = 1.0

      Automation under the folder to remove duplicates already included anywhere under the "Primary Scope" or "Candidate Scope" folders for this release.  (HOW TO DO THIS?)

Folder: "Release 1.1"

   Folder: "Primary Scope"

   ...  repeat pattern above

The intent of the Structure board is to manually populate the high level items such as Epics and allow automation to fill in the issues associated with the epics.  The "Misc Automated" folder is to show any missed items not already shown under Primary Scope or Candidate Scope that have the associated Fix Version set.

I've tried many S-JQL filters at the Misc Automated folder level with no success.  Attempts include queries such as...

not descendantorissue of prevsibling in not empty    -- as S-JQL automation filter

self not in (descendantorself of prevsibling in not empty)     -- as S-JQL automation filter

not (descendants of folder("Planned Primary Scope") and descendants of folder("Misc (Automated)"))     -- as a quick transformation

I've also tried filtering using JQL such as

issue not in structure("Upcoming Releases", "descendant of folder('Primary Scope')")

but the other folders named "Primary Scope" for other releases are included in the result set, not just the one associated with the parent folder.  This also ran very slow when executed against a set of thousands of items bundled under multiple release folders.  The slow performance is what led me to seek a S-JQL solution where I could potentially limit the duplicate search to siblings under the same parent folder.

Thanks in advance.

[Stepan Kholodov _ALM Works_ · Accepted solution]

Hello,

If I understand correctly, the goal is to create a filter in the Misc Automated folder that will only keep issues that are not already added in the Primary Scope and the Candidate Scope folders in each branch without considering issues in such folders in other branches. If this is so, we recommend changing the hierarchy of folders a bit: to add another level of folders above the Release X.X folders and to move the Misc Automated folder to the same level of the Release X.X folder. Then it will be possible to add the filter in the Misc folder and use this JQL query in it. And to avoid filtering altogether and avoid adding issues that are not needed, the Insert generator's query just can be tailored to this:

fixVersion=1.0 and issue not in structure("Upcoming Releases", "descendant of folder('Release X.X')")

This way, each folder's filter can reference a Release folder with a unique name.

Please note that such a set-up can be quite resource-consuming because of all the querying, so if there is a lot of branches with content, we recommend splitting this structure into several just to lighten the strain on the performance.

I hope this helps. If you need further assistance with the set-up, please contact directly at support.almworks.com and we will take a look at it more closely.

Best regards,
Stepan Kholodov
ALM Works