2 things: Epic Link not recognized and sorting Kanban board by due date impossible?

[Walter Lamm]

Hey there,

my team and I are in the beta phase of starting to work with Jira and right now I got two questions to help us work more efficient and automated:

1. Is there a way to sort our Kanban board by due date instead of rank in new issue view? It'd be even better if I could configure the columns to sort in different ways. I can't seem to find the option but I also can't wrap my head around why such a fundamental feature would be missing. I mean Trello has it so why not Jira? 
2. I don't know why but if I try to use Epic Link in my automations or filters it does nothing. For example when I filter for issues which clearly are linked to Epics the column "Epic Link" is empty. What seems to be the problem here?

Thanks a lot and best regards

[Daniel Ebers · Accepted solution]

Hi @Walter Lamm

now I also read through the latest of your questions, which I should have done before as I think this helped me understanding the whole picture better.

Yes, it seems for the moment you were just running into timing issues where the issues was not yet fully created but your automation rules were ready to tackle inside the corresponding issue everything you intented. The re-fetch action mostly helps.

On a transition to "done" (or any else) this apparently does not occur in this intensity why you seem to not need to re-fetch.

From looking all over it I think everything was captured. Please do let Community know if something else should be missing.

In case of any follow-up question it might make more sense to create a new post, I'm unsure how much traffic this will get after some days passed now.

Regards,
Daniel

[Walter Lamm]

Hey @Daniel Ebers

re-fetch fully solved my problem, thanks a lot! Now it works like a charm!

Concerning weblinks: I'll read through your contributed ressources and try to find a better working solution but for now I settled on adding the weblink in an extra field which then I can address.

Trudy Claspill mentioned the impossibility of changing our board filter because our board is team managed. Do you know any way for us to change sorting from rank to due date?

Again: Thanks a lot and have a nice week!

[Daniel Ebers · Accepted solution]

Hi @Walter Lamm

I feel there are meanwhile some open questions so I'd like to answer one before I forget it.

You said:

I want the automation to only work for issues created under the Epic EB-2 which is named "Anträge".

It looks you did things right but were running into a timing-issue. I reproduced it and fixed it the following way:

You would need to tweak the rule according to your environment. I not fully understood why you are removing watchers, or, in other words where they were set so removing in my case did not make any sense. Anyway, I inserted the action to make it more look like yours.

Please check if this helps.

You also had a question to web-links:

Do you know how I could also copy the inserted weblink in a parent issue to it's sub-issue on creation?

Looking around a bit I am not confident if this is available as of now in regards of a open suggestion.

Please also refer to:

https://codebarrel.atlassian.net/browse/AUT-176

While you referred weblinks the Suggestion is about remote issue links (links to another Jira instance) however it might be the technical backgrounds are the same.
In the following thread a workaround for linking Confluence seem to have been found:
https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/Is-there-a-way-to-add-Web-link-Remotelink-using-Automation-for/qaq-p/1453035#U1453502

You could check all of this and evaluate in your environment but it seems like a bunch of worarounds for the moment.

Regards,
Daniel

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Walter Lamm 

Welcome to the community.

Concerning question #1.

- You cannot set up board columns to have different sorting criteria for the issues.

- A fundamental concept of Kanban is that you order you work by priority/importance and you work on it in priority/importance order. Therefore, the ordering of issues is RANK. That enables you to drag-and-drop the issues to reorder them. The RANKing applies to all the issues included in the board, regardless of status. JIRA's implementation of RANK is to keep track of relative rank; for each issue JIRA tracks the issue that is one level higher and the one that is one level lower. As you move issues from one column to another, they retain their relative rank. If you re-order them within the column, JIRA resets the relative rank of all the issues as needed.

- You can change the filter to order the issues by Due Date, but you will lose the ability to re-order them by dragging and dropping the issues.

Concerning question #2

- Can you provide some screen images to show us this problem? Show us images of your filter and its results, plus an image of a few of the issues involved.

[Walter Lamm]

Hi @Trudy Claspill

Thank you for your warm welcome and the quick reply.

Question 1:

"- You can change the filter to order the issues by Due Date, but you will lose the ability to re-order them by dragging and dropping the issues."

That would be great and I'm okay with losing the ability to drag&drop issues because our priority is sorted by due dates.

But where can I change the filter for our board? I can see that option in my filters and I have seen screenshots of that option in classic projects but I can't find it in our next gen project..

Question 2:

Of course I can show you some examples.

Here is a simple filter which shows I can't even select any other option than "No Epic Link" when filtering for it. The empty column on the right also doesn't return the right epic of which we have two. We use these epics as constant swimlanes to differentiate two major processes. An issue moves through the statuses in the first epic and after a few months through the same statuses in our second epic. So all our issues are part of one of these epics. None of them show up in my filters and don't return any results in my rules though.

Here you can see an example issue with its epic.

Here you can see one of those two epics and all its subsidiary issues.

Any ideas why that is?

Thanks a lot for your kind help!

Best regards

[Trudy Claspill]

Ah, well, I did not know you were using a Team Managed project/board. I am not aware of any way to change the ordering of issues for such a board since the filter for the board is not directly modifiable.

Regarding Epic Link - this appears to be another difference between Company Managed and Team Managed projects. I don't work with Team Managed - I just create them for experiments to try to answer community posts. What I found is that instead of Epic Link, in a Team Managed project the Parent field is used to for identifying the parent Epic for an issue, and for identifying the parent issue of a sub-task.

[Walter Lamm]

Hey @Trudy Claspill 

oh, that's too bad I can't change the filter of our board.

Regarding Epic Link / Parent Link:

Could you maybe write me the correct smart values I could use when filtering an automation I built?

I want the automation to only work for issues created under the Epic EB-2 which is named "Anträge".

I already tried {{issue.parent.summary}} equals "Anträge":

And also {{issue.parent.key}} equals "EB-2" but unfortunately both didn't work.

I also tried {{issue.parent.fields.labels}} equals "Antrag" (which is EB-2s label) and also the same for {{issue.epic.fields.labels}}. Any idea why none of this worked? 

Oh and one more thing: Do you know how I could also copy the inserted weblink in a parent issue to it's sub-issue on creation? Other fields like description, labels, connected issues and so on are no problem but I can't find any info on weblinks..

Thanks a lot!

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Walter Lamm 

Can you explain the scenario for your automation and what you are trying to accomplish, for the image you showed? There may be a way to accomplish it without smart values.

[Walter Lamm]

Hey @Trudy Claspill 

the rule configures the fields for every issue that gets created with some if-clauses which take into account the summary of those issues. For example if the summary includes "XYZ" the estimated time to complete schould be 1h 15m, else 45m and so on.

And that works very well. But unfortunately because we just started to use Jira there are a lot of issues that get created in the second Epic (EB-3 titled "Abschlüsse"), because they were in the second half of our processes when we switched. So the rule configures them as if they were in the first half which is wrong. That's why I wanted to include an if-check for the epic. 

And while writing this I remembered I was able to adress the epic with one rule and no others. Here is the rule which gets triggered when an issue is moved to the Finished column. The rule then deletes any labels and in the next step copies the label of the parent issue (übergeordneter Vorgang in German) to the issue which triggered the rule.

I don't understand why this works here and not in other rules. And I don't understand why the next if-check (label = Antrag) doesn't trigger anything after the previous step clearly copied that label into the issue.

Thanks a lot for your continued interest in helping me. I really appreciate it.