Need to pull old employees work but assignee function is not working in Advanced Search

[Victoria Campbell]

I need to pull all of the tickets an old employee worked on while at the company.  I have not deleted the user, but simply blocked their access.  When I search their name in Advanced search I get this error, "The value '...' does not exist for the field 'assignee'.  There must be historical information stored in Jira, so I don't understand why I can't look up previous work from this user.  I have also tried filtering it down to a specific project I know they worked on, but it's still not working.  Assignee was functions also do not work.  

[Ste Wright · Accepted solution]

Hi @Victoria Campbell

For a single user, the assignee field only works for active users. You can search for where the Assignee is any inactive user using:

assignee in inactiveUsers()

If you want to search for just one user though, there is an alternative option. You'll need to be a Site Admin to set this up:

1. Select Jira Settings > User Management
2. Create a new Group - eg. Inactive User
3. Add the inactive user to the group
4. In JQL, enter...

assignee in membersOf("Inactive User")

That will give you the results for one specific inactive user.

Ste

[Victoria Campbell]

This worked! Thank you