Writing a JQL query for stories in specific Epic

[Vamsi Fragale]

How can I write a query where I can list all stories under an Epic, where each epic Summary has a specific prefix.

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @Vamsi Fragale,

unfortunately, this is trickier than one might think; as a hierarchical query, it would really require some kind of "join" or "subquery", which isn't available in plain Jira/JQL.

A few directions forward:

• If it's a one-off thing, you could first query the relevant epics, and then use the keys of these epics in a second query, in an "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" epic information down to the epic's 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.  I've used JQL Search Extensions a few times and it works well.
• 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. Put simply, you'd create a sheet with all issues that are potentially relevant to you, enable the default issue hierarchy (that's just one click), and then use JXL filtering capabilities to narrow down to the issues that you care about:

Once you have your list of issues, you can work on these directly in JXL (much like you'd do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets), trigger various operations in Jira, or export them for further processing.

Any questions just let me know!

[Darren Ching]

Hi @Vamsi Fragale

If your project is company-managed, you may be able to display the issues using this JQL query in native Jira:

parentEpic in (EPIC-1, EPIC-2, EPIC-3, etc.)

This would only work if there aren't too many Epics, or if you don’t mind maintaining that list from time to time. The query will provide you the Epics as well as their issues and tasks under them.

With Hierarchy (an app that my team and I are working on), this is easily doable by just adding a Quick Filter with the following JQL:

issuetype="Epic" AND summary~"Prefix”

What this does behind the scenes is grab all your Epics which contain the specified prefix. Then, it displays all their children issues as long as you have the “Show all child issues” option enabled. Here’s an example with "User Experience" as the prefix:

If you need any help, feel free to reach out to me or our Support channel anytime, will be happy to help!

[Charlotte Santos -Appfire-]

Hi @Vamsi Fragale 

I’m Charlotte, a support engineer at Appfire and I’m here to help you.

Unfortunately, natively, 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 get all stories under an Epic whose Epic summary has a specific prefix:

issue in childrenOfEpicsInQuery("summary ~ 'Test'") AND type = Story

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

We’ll be happy to help you!

[Kalyan Sattaluri]

Hello @Vamsi Fragale 

Such queries are not available OOTB.

Do you know if you have scriptrunner add-on available?

[Vamsi Fragale]

Thanks for your response, Kalyan, but no, we don't have scriptrunner