Automate Linking in Custom Hierarchy

[Mark Schweighardt]

Hello, We are trying to use Jira + Structure for Jira pugin to achieve the following hierarchy and to automate the linking of the levels in the hierarchy:

Initiative

     Epic

          Story

               Task

                    Sub-Task

Can someone please explain how this can be done?

thanks

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Mark Schweighardt 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

I have not worked with Structure before, but I think a useful piece of information to provide would be if you tell us whether your environment is Jira Cloud or Jira Data Center.

Also could you provide more information about how you think that the automation should work?

The default hierarchy in Jira (both Cloud and Data Center) has 3 levels:

Level 1 = Epic
|-- Level 0 = "standard" issue types like Story, Bug, and Task
    |-- Level -1 = Sub-task issue types

When viewing an issue of a type higher than Level -1 there is usually a method directly within the issue to create a child issue. Executing that function will automatically create the parent/child relationship between the issue being viewed and the issue being created.

The native hierarchy would not support creating a Task as a child of a Story because natively they are in the same level. That, of course, is where apps like Structure add capabilities to Jira that it doesn't have natively. And such apps may require you to provide some configuration information about the issue hierarchy you want them to recognize.

Since I don't work with Structure I don't know the details of how to configure it, or if you then have to perhaps create the issues through the Structure UI in order for the parent/child relationships to be created automatically.

Have you reviewed the documentation that is provided for Structure to see if it contains the answers you are seeking?

Is there some other functional path that you think you should be able to use to automatically create links in the manner you show in your hierarchy? Are you trying to set up an Automation for Jira rule to do that for you?