How do you change a subtask issue to a top-level issue type while maintaining the link to the original parent issue?

[Logan G Hawkes]

I have an instance of Jira 4.4.3 with a large number of issues of type "user story". Each user story has a large number of subtasks of type "test case". I need to move all of the test cases to a new issue type that's not a subtask. The problem is that I need to maintain the link from the test case to it's former parent user story. Moving the issues isn't a big problem, but retaining the link back to the parent is difficult. There's no JQL function for getting the parent of a given subtask. I'm dealing with about 3000 test cases and a few hundred user stories, so creating the links manually is a nightmare scenario.

I've tried several approaches. So far my best idea is to write a chunk of Java code that will:

1. Create a list of all test cases
2. For each test case
   1. Get the parent issue
   2. Move the test case to the new issue type
   3. Create a link back to the (former) parent user story

I'm hesitant to start coding because I've never tried writing a java app that will make bulk changes to my Jira instance and the prospect of making a mistake and hosing 3000+ issues is daunting. Is there an easier and/or safer way to do this?

[Bob Swift · Accepted solution]

Use the linkIssue action from JIRA Command Line Interface on each of the user story issues to add a link to the issue's parent. Use the runFromSql action with a query that gets each of the issues you need.