Automation to get dates from issues to epics

[Olli Lutz]

Hello community,

i have 2 automations in place which shall update the EPICs

Due date from the issues in the epic "{{issue.Due date.max}}"  &

Start date from the  issues in the epic "{{issue.Start date.min}}" 

The audit log gives me a success status but nothing really gets added or changed in the epic. When i have already dates set in the epic. The automation overrides the current dates to empty

I used the same automation successful for a level lower. Subtasks to Issues/Stories

Thanks for any advice

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Olli Lutz 

I do not believe this syntax works with Jira Cloud automation and epics: {{issue.Due date.max}}  Note that Server/Data Center has an {{issues}} smart value for batches.  Jira Cloud instead uses Lookup Issues for batches.

Please try a Lookup Issues action to gather the child issues and then get the value.  For example extending your rule which appears triggered on a child-of-epic issue

• ...
• action: Lookup Issues with JQL of "Epic Link" = {{triggerIssue.epic link}}  Please add more criteria if you need to limit the children which are checked.
• branch: on the epic (parent)
  • ...
  • action: edit issue
    • Due date to the maximum would be {{lookupIssues.Due date.max}}
    • ...

Kind regards,
Bill

[Olli Lutz]

Hi Bill,

thanks for the feedback. 

As is said, it is working the same way between sub tasks and issues. But might be different in the relation between Epic and issues?

Bests

Olli

[Bill Sheboy]

Thanks makes sense to me, Olli...

Sub-tasks (although distinct issues) are "part of" their parent, and so have additional smart values which allow accessing down to the children (or up to the parent) directly within the rule.

For all others (epics to children, and linked issues) automation has limited data about the related issue until loaded somehow, such as with branching or lookup issues.  If all issues worked like sub-tasks, the automation rule would potentially need to pull in lots of data for every possible connected issue to support a syntax like {{issue.parent.parent.parent.parent... or a web in the case of linked issues.

[John Stewart]

For what it's worth, here's what I implemented:

Every time I update a non-epic issue, I check to see if the start date for the epic is after the updated (trigger) issue's start date.

• If not, no action.
• If so, I copy the trigger issue's start date to the epic.

That way, if I create another issue within the epic, and it happens to have an earlier start date, that will re-evaluate the epic's start date and update the epic accordingly.

This became a must-have when we pushed Jira items to ProductPlan for a - supposedly - more robust and shareable roadmap; Product Plan requires that all epics and child issues have dates, and those child issue dates all need to fit within the epic's date range, or it will not sync correctly.

Hope that helps, happy to hear others' thoughts.