Looping using Jira automation and For JQL

[Jezza Sutton]

I am using Jira automation to "clone" an epic and create tickets all the child stories in the source epic and attach to the new cloned epic. I am using Team Managed Jira,

I found that the "cloned" epic has the tickets in something like reverse order when I use "For: Stories (and other issues in Epic)"

I tried changing this to For: JQL and using something like parent = {{parentKey}} order by key (where {{parentKey}} is a variable I createad earlier. That seems to work and the audit log shows the child stories in the correct order. 

The Create Issue in the For: loop does not seem to honor this order. Any idea how I can create the child stories so the key is in the same order as the source? The child stories are a set of steps that go in a specific order and it just place looks nicer if I do this.

[Kian Stack Mumo Systems · Accepted solution]

@Jezza Sutton, 

I read another community article recently saying that the branching mechanism works asynchronously and therefore cannot be used for circumstances like. Could you create a manual rule that you could trigger that has the Epic and all of it's children defined? Or do you want to clone it at certain steps?

You could also try setting  up dependencies in the tickets. So the first step "Blocks" the next step, so on and so forth.

[Jezza Sutton]

I guess I could create two manual rules that instead of running one rule over either of my two templates, I could run a rule for "create epic type 1" and another for "create epic type 2".  That's pretty specific, I was hoping to have something more generic to "clone" any epic. Burt yeah, that would work. I might do that when I get a moment.

It sure acts like it is asynchronous!

[Luka Hummel - codefortynine]

Hi @Jezza Sutton and welcome to the community!

If you are willing to try a third-party app, our Deep Clone for Jira can clone your epic hierarchy with the Epic/Tree Clone feature and will try to replicate your order as close as possible. There are some limitations on the ordering of the issue keys, but from your description this should be no problem.

Let me know if you encounter any unexpected behavior.