How to Copy a field value (priority and components) from parent issue to child issue by automation

[Arshad Hussain]

I have tried looking for a solution for this and found many discussions on this. None of the solutions provided work after trying them many times. When a team member creates a Epic(Parent) and creates all the child issues (User Stories/Tasks/Sub-Tasks) I want certain field values to be consistent between them (priority, components etc). I am not sure why is this is so complicated to do in Jira using automations. Can somebody please provide a working solution for this along with the explanation. Thank you in advance!

[Els Bassant · Accepted solution]

Hi Arshad, 

What works for me is the following configuration in automation. It feels a little bit counter-intuitive since the condition is "Parent exists" and not "Epic exists".

Please note that this automation only works if the newly created issue is part of the Epic upon creation. If some issues are created and only added to an Epic later you will need a similar automation for when the issue is updated.

Likewise, if the copied fields may be updated on the epic, you will need an automation that then copies the new values to all of the child issues.

[Arshad Hussain]

I just tried the above.

I created an Epic (parent) and created a User Story (Child)under it and it worked perfectly :)

I created a sub-task (child) under a User Story (parent) and it did not work :(

Also, any change done to the parent did not result in any change to the priority and components and that is trigger is only when an issue is created (1st step). I would like the changes also to be reflected if there is one. 

P.S. Really appreciate your help with this!

[Els Bassant]

Hi Arshad, 

Before I post more automations I want to verify something: should a subtask always have the same components as their parent story, or only when they are part of an epic?

For example, if you remove the second condition in the automation I posted above it will work on any parent / child combination. But I don't know whether that is what you want.

[Arshad Hussain]

Yes, the sub-task needs to have the same priority and components of user story or task (parent) by default.

[Arshad Hussain]

Hi @Els Bassant ,

Your idea worked perfectly. as @Thibaut Subra _Elements_ mentioned there are two parts to this which sort of made it a bit tricky. Instead of combining into one automation,I created two separate ones, and it works perfectly fine now.

[Thibaut Subra _Elements_]

Hi @Arshad Hussain 

I may have a solution using an app we developed at Elements called Copy & Sync.

I understand that you need to create an Epic, User Stories and their subtasks. Each of these issues are created manually.

It's working with recipes. In your case, we need two recipes:

1. As soon as you created the Epic, you can trigger a recipe from the Epic that will create a User Story with Priority and Components fields synchronized with the Epic.

2. Once the User Story is created, you trigger another recipe to create a subtask, also with Priority and Components fields synchronized with the User Story (Parent).

That way, the Epic is synchronized with the User Stories and the User Stories are synchronized with they subtasks. And you choose if the synchronization is bidirectional or not.

You don't need to create an Automation (but you can trigger recipes from it if needed), team members just have to create issues and their subtasks through recipes and all synchronization will be automated.

It's just a quick explanation to give you an overview of what can be possible but if you're interested, I'll be glad to help!

Regards