Bulk change and linking issues
Asked by Lloyd:

Hi guys,

I was just wondering if anybody know if it is possible to bulk edit and link several issues together? WITHOUT getting any plugin, as I am certain my company will not agree to downloading any plugins.

So my thought is using appropriate labels and then bulk linking all of the issues together.


Answers:
author: Lloyd
body: Thanks for the swift response, and I apologize for my tardy answer [@Trudy Claspill](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3569011) .

I work in the the servicedesk of a company and some day we have our end-users reporting the same issue. Lets say that is an orange appearing on their screen. So we create and use the label \<\<Fruit_orange\>\> and use the first issue (serv-1) and manually link all of the other issues to this one. I know about the possibility to bulk change, unfortunately bulk change doesnt seem to include \<\<link to x issue\>\>. If That is possible it would solve a great deal of work.


author: Trudy Claspill
body: Hello [@Lloyd](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5580947)

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Depending on the the details of your scenario it can probably be accomplished using Automation Rules.

<https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-cloud-automation/>

Jira Administrators can create such rules. Often they also allow Project Administrators to create such rules.

Is this something that needs to be done repeatedly? Will the issues exist in a single project or do the issue span multiple projects? Is this something that needs to be triggered automatically by some action in Jira, or is it something that you would be agreeable to trigger manually?

comments: author: Trudy Claspill
body: Hello [@Lloyd](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5580947)

You are correct that the Bulk Change feature can't be used for linking issues.

You could use an Automation Rule to accomplish this.

You could use a Manually Triggered automation rule. With the manually triggered rule you would prompt the user to enter the Label value that they want to add.

The rule would then add the value to the current issue,  
And look for other issues that have the same label,  
And create a link between the current issue and the oldest issue among the ones found.

You could alternately create a rule that is triggered when a new value is added directly to the Labels field, to search for other issues with the same label and link to the oldest one found. However I suspect you don't want to do that with **every** label. So you would need to make the label values of interest unique so that their values would indicate that the automation should link the issue to another issue with the same label.


author: Lloyd
body: Your are correct in your assumption regarding the labels, [@Trudy Claspill](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3569011) . Do you have an How-to creating such a automation rule?? And can one trigger that across projects? Since sometimes one also wants to link those same issues to a bug. That is; create an automation rule to link all \<\<Fruit_orange\>\> to both serv-1(first issue on the subject) and bug-1(the bug created with regards to \<\<Fruit_orange\>\>


author: Trudy Claspill
body: To create a rule that can access and update issues in multiple projects the rule has to be created as a Multiple Project Scope rule. Those can be created only by Jira Admins.

Such rules can be set as Global scope, meaning they can be triggered from every project, or they can be set to specify a subset of projects explicitly.

The following addresses only your requirement to link to the oldest issue with the same label:

An example of a manual rule that would prompt for the label to be applied and searched for is as follows:

![Screenshot 2024-09-19 at 9.35.01?AM.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/348217i25C9CBC6EB2303C6/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Screenshot 2024-09-19 at 9.35.01?AM.png")

You might want to next insert an action to confirm that the entry has no blank spaces, or to replace blank spaces with a dash or underscore. Blank spaces aren't allowed in Label values.

Then edit the current issue to add the Label.

![Screenshot 2024-09-19 at 9.38.44?AM.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/348218iE1FE6198412945AC/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Screenshot 2024-09-19 at 9.38.44?AM.png")

Then look for other issues that have the same label. Order them by Created Date ascending so that the first one in the list is the oldest. Exclude the current issue from the results.

![Screenshot 2024-09-19 at 9.41.10?AM.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/348220i2A98FAF90294BAA9/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Screenshot 2024-09-19 at 9.41.10?AM.png")

Confirm that at least one issue was found.

![Screenshot 2024-09-19 at 9.43.11?AM.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/348221i4D4819E4E245C9F5/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Screenshot 2024-09-19 at 9.43.11?AM.png")

Create a link between the trigger issue and the first issue in the results set.

![Screenshot 2024-09-19 at 9.44.23?AM.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/348222iA472666A06DACB55/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Screenshot 2024-09-19 at 9.44.23?AM.png")

If you wanted to link to issues only in specific projects you can refine to JQL in the Lookup Issues action to search for only those issues.

If you want to link to other issues based on other conditions (i.e. same label, issue type=Bug) you could use another Lookup Issues action to find those issues. If there is more than one issue found and you want to link the trigger issue to all of them, you would have to use branching to iterate through the list of found issues to link to each one.


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