Filtering out 'Closed' epics in eazyBI

[Vidula Kulkarni]

We manage our Jira workflow through Epics.

Because a sub-task is not linked to an Epic we have created a post script to populate a custom text field called “Epic Reporting Name”, with the Epic name against all issues & sub-tasks..etc This is imported into EazyBI as a dimension. In our reports the “Epic Reporting Name” dimension is typically on Pages to allow the user to filter for the Epics they are in charge of.

Problem:

Over time the number of Epics will grow and we don’t want to have the names of the Epics which have been ‘closed’ to appear in the drop-down filter. It creates too much noise for the user. We need some capability to filter out these closed Epics.

Things I’ve tried:

1. Added another custom text field, “Epic Status”, containing the ‘closed’ status, again imported as a dimension. I added this dimension to Pages: so we had both “Epic Status” & “Epic Reporting Name” in that order. On Rows I had the Issue dimension.

The issues in the resulting table displayed the correct results and only showed those issues where “Epic Status” <> “Closed”.

However, when I set the “Epic Status” filter = (none),  the names of those closed Epics still appeared in the “Epic Reporting Name” filter. So it appears there is no link between the filters & their contents?

1. Tried a regular expression on the table column to exclude all issues where “Epic Status” = “Closed”. Which it did correctly. But this also had no impact on the contents of the filter.

So I guess we’re looking for some MDX to create in a calculated member for “Epic Reporting Name” which will create a set based on the value of a custom field in the Issue dimension (whether that value is then brought in a dimension in its own right or not)?

Constraints:

We cannot use JQL to filter out these Epics at the source import because there are finance users who will want to see them in their reports.

Thanks in advance.

[Daina Tupule eazyBI]

Selected dimensions in the report are mutually independent, and only measures are 'gluing' them together. Therefore, a filter on one dimension members selected in Pages (or in Rows) does not have any impact on available values from another dimension selected in Pages. The context is visible only in report table: whether the measure in a cross-section of all report dimensions is calculated or not. 

Calculated member with MDX for active epics within your ‘Epic Reporting Name' dimension can be created if both dimensions ‘Epic Reporting Name’ and ‘Epic Status’ have common measure indicating epic status. 

I would suggest using Issue dimension Epic hierarchy together with your custom field ‘Epic status’ in Pages.

There are 3 different issue hierarchies in Issue dimension. 
- Issue - all issues (sub-tasks and issue) are treated at the same level
- Sub-task - issue-sub-task level is taken into account, for example - default measures will automatically sum up sub-task measures in an issue level, for example, 'hours spent' will automatically work for this hierarchy for an issue and all its sub-tasks you do not need to use 'hours spent with sub-tasks’ for this.
- Epic - will work the same as issue-sub-task with additional epic level. For example, 'hours spent' will be automatically summed up in epic level for all issues and sub-tasks. Dimension is created if Epic link field is imported.

You could create a report with all active epics and then allow for your users to select an epic in a report and with ’Select this’  filter your report only to this epic with all its issues and sub-tasks.

If you have further questions about your specific case, please contact support@eazybi.com directly.

Daina / support@eazybi.com