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Work Item Hierarchy Field application now available

I’m a big fan of Jira Plans and in particular the additional work item hierarchy levels that it provides. These can be used to help co-ordinate and report progress on large projects involving multiple teams.

Unfortunately I find that some users won't interact with Plans very often because there can be no obvious link from the board they're working on to the plans where it is used.

The breadcrumb trail in the work item details screen only shows the immediate parent and project and is very much aimed towards standard users that do not have access to the additional hierarchy levels afforded to premium users.

As a consequence most users don’t immediately understand how work “ladders up” to higher level objectives.

I decided to put together an application to address this challenge...

Ideally I would have liked to have swapped out the existing breadcrumb trail but that’s not currently possible. I considered the various Forge extension points on the work item details page and in the end decided that for maximum prominence / minimum clicks it would be best to create a custom field.

The application was written using UI Kit and only took a couple of hours from start to finish and really shows the power of the Forge platform !!

The app simply grabs the work item from the extension context that Forge provides and uses the REST API to iteratively walk up the parent links until it runs out of ancestors.

These are then rendered as links into the field.

Screenshot 2025-08-26 at 3.32.53 pm.png

If your team uses Jira Plans then you might find this a useful add-on.

The application is available for free on the marketplace here: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/3518614169/work-item-hierarchy-field

Post installation setup instructions can be found here: https://draperd.atlassian.net/wiki/external/ZGQ4YTgxOGJiM2VjNDg1NDg0ZWU0MWUzMWZmYzMzZjU 

5 comments

Vikrant Yadav
Community Champion
August 25, 2025

Great Custom field @Dave  
We can easily see All Level of Hierarchy on view screen

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Josh
Rising Star
Rising Star
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August 26, 2025

@Dave this is really interesting and helpful!

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Debbie Jolley
Contributor
August 27, 2025

This is such a useful app @Dave 

Not sure if it's something funky our end, but the display isn't resolving nicely for me :-( (ticket names redacted)

Hierarchy App - Screenshot 2025-08-27 084758.png


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Dave
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 27, 2025

Thanks for the feedback @Debbie Jolley ... are those work item type icons custom by any chance? This might be a known issue with the image rendering (I believe there is an open bug for this) but I'll look into this - I really appreciate the feedback on this though.

It looks like the Epic icon is rendering fine and is an out-of-the-box icon which is why it probably renders ok.... I'll dig into this today and see if I can reproduce and come up with a workaround or fix.

Again, I really appreciate you letting me know! This kind of feedback is so helpful! 

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Debbie Jolley
Contributor
August 28, 2025

@Dave thanks for getting back to me.
Programme and Workstream are definitely icons we downloaded from the web - I thought Theme was one of the standard ones but it doesn't look like the new style so am not 100% sure (see attached image)

Theme icon - Screenshot 2025-08-28 085532.png

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