How can I search by summary of the parent item?

[Mary Ellen wallace]

I am trying to set a Quick Filter to exclude any subtasks where the summary of its parent story contains the phrase "migration".  How do I reference the summary of an item's parent?  

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @Mary Ellen wallace

to the best of my knowledge, in plain Jira/JQL you can only filter by the parent issue's issue key, but not by the parent issue's summary.

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 parents in a second query, in a "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. JQL Search Extensions and Scriptrunner are popular, but there are many others. 
• 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:

For context, JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view for your issues that allows viewing, inline-editing, sorting, and filtering by all your issue fields, much like you’d do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets. It also comes with a number of so-called smart columns that aren’t natively available, including the parent summary.

As you can see above, you can easily sort and filter by the parent summary, and also use it across JXL's advanced features, such as support for (configurable) issue hierarchies, issue grouping by any issue field(s), sum-ups, or conditional formatting.

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes

[Mary Ellen wallace]

Thank you very much!  

[Charlotte Santos -Appfire-]

Hi @Mary Ellen wallace 

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 any subtasks where the summary of its parent story contains the phrase "migration":

issue in subtasksOfParentsInQuery("type = Story AND summary ~ 'migration'")

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

We’ll be happy to help you!