Filter is only pulling in Epics and not issues with said Epic

[kristen.shryack]

I'm trying to create a filter that pulls issues of a certain epic type. Currently I have:

Project = Proj123 AND "Epic Name" ~ "Outage"

This pulls in epics that have Outage in the name, but not any of the stories or tasks in that epic. I also tried:

Project = Proj123 AND "Epic Name" ~ "Outage" AND issuetype != "Epic"

but then nothing gets pulled. This same jql works for an automation but not for a filter. Any reason why or should I be pulling it differently?

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Accepted solution]

Hi @kristen.shryack,

unfortunately, this is trickier than one might think; as a "hierarchical query", it would really require some kind of join or subquery, which isn't available in plain Jira/JQL.

A few directions forward:

• If it's a one-off thing, you could first query the relevant epics, and then use the keys of these epics in a second query, in an ""Epic link" in (KEY-1, KEY-2, ...)" clause.

If you want to run your search dynamically, without manually "stitching" two queries together, you'll need extra tooling:

• You might be able to use Jira Automation to "propagate" epic information down to the epic's children, and then use the respective field(s) on the children to include them into your filter. Obviously, this will add a fair bit of complexity to your system.
• There's different apps from the Atlassian Marketplace that can help with that. First, there's a number of apps that extend JQL by additional functions, including hierarchy-related functions. I've used JQL Search Extensions a few times and it works well.
• Alternatively, you could try one of the more hierarchy-focused apps from the Marketplace. These apps typically have their own ways of figuring out parent/child relationships between issues, and provide more powerful ways of searching through issue hierarchies. I myself work on such an app, in which your use case would be easy to solve - I'll provide more details below.

Hope this helps,

Best,

Hannes

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Just to expand on the last point, this is how this would look in the app that my team and I are working on, JXL for Jira. Put simply, you'd create a sheet with all issues that are potentially relevant to you, enable the default issue hierarchy (that's just one click), and then use JXL filtering capabilities to narrow down to the issues that you care about:

Once you have your list of issues, you can work on these directly in JXL (much like you'd do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets), trigger various operations in Jira, or export them for further processing.

Any questions just let me know!

[Charlotte Santos -Appfire-]

Hi @kristen.shryack

I’m Charlotte, a support engineer at Appfire and I’m here to help you.

Unfortunately, using vanilla JQL, you’ll not be able to do it dynamically.

In the app where my team works, JQL Search Extensions for Jira, you can use this query to find the Epics that have Outage in their Epic Name and their children:

project = Proj123 AND "Epic Name" ~ "Outage" OR issue in childrenOfEpicsInQuery("project = Proj123 AND 'Epic Name' ~ 'Outage'")

Please contact our support if you have any other questions about this query.

We’ll be happy to help you!

Best regards,

Charlotte

[Giovanni Melai]

Hi @kristen.shryack

If you want all the Stories/Tasks and Subtasks under an Epic you can use:

parentEpic in (KEY-1, KEY-2)

Where KEY-1 and KEY-2 are the keys of the Epics, you can add more of course.

If you want only the Stories/Tasks you can also use

"Parent Link" in (KEY-1, KEY-2)

The main problem is that you cannot use the Epic Name to find the children of the Epic but you need to use the key.

I hope this helps 

[Kian Stack Mumo Systems]

@kristen.shryack, 

Epic Name in a JQL should only show Epic issue types, not any child items.

If you want to find child items, you need to search using "Epic Link" in (<Epic Keys>).