How to show sub-tasks based on field in parent tasks in dashboard

[meredith.poole]

Hi! I'm trying to get a count/list of sub-tasks in a dashboard, based on a field in the parent task. For example, all Tasks have a field called "Team" which is filled in like {Team 1, Team 2, Team 3, etc}. All of these Tasks have Sub-tasks, but the Sub-tasks don't have the "Team" field. I want to be able create a dynamic filter to select Team 1 in a dashboard based on the Tasks, and return all of the Sub-tasks associated with these tasks. Basically just be able to get a visual that shows something like "Team 1 has 6 sub-tasks"

I have access to Rich Filters and Scriptrunner, but can't add any more apps. 

[Gustavo Moraes]

Good day, @meredith.poole

If you create an automation to fill the "Team" field on each Sub-Task based on the parent, wouldn't it work for you?

You could start setting it as a scheduled automation, to update existing sub-tasks, and then configure it so that whenever the sub-task is created or edited, this field is already populated based on the parent.

Or by any chance you can't have the Team field on the Sub-Task?

[meredith.poole]

Yeah, I think that is what we are going to end up having to do. I was hoping to figure out a way with just the data already present. Thanks for the input!

[Mathew Lederman]

In ScriptRunner's Enhanced Search you would just do:

 issueFunction in subtasksOf("Team = 'Team 1'") 

Unfortunately in Jira Cloud you can't use ScriptRunner's searches in normal JQL or for dashboards to the best of my knowledge.

[meredith.poole]

While this does work, there are lots of "teams" in my data, so it wouldn't be practical to create filters for all of them. I was hoping to be able to select the team interactively in the dashboard. 

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @meredith.poole,

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 parents, and then use the keys of these epics in a second query, in an "parent 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 parent information down to the 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:

(I'm using labels here, but it would work the same way with any other field.)

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!