Unable to edit or remove parent work item

[Simon Pearce]

How do I change the Epic that my work item is linked to?

Following the official instructions, I opened the Command Palette and looked for either Edit Parent or Remove Parent but found neither of them.

Do I need a specific Project permission to do this? I am an administrator of the Project and of the application.

[Staffan Redelius]

Hi @Simon Pearce 

It works for me if i click exactly on the  icon for the parent (for Epics it's the purple icon) seems to work the same way if you click on the icon in the breadcrumb. If I click on the name/link i get re-directed to the Epic.

Could it be that simple?

Best regards,
/Staffan

[Simon Pearce]

No it's not that simple.  :-( 

If I click on the name of the Epic in the right-pane the field is not editable - clicking the Epic name takes me to the Epic as surely as if I had clicked the Epic link in the breadcrumbs. 

Comparing the behavior between two Projects :

• I am an admin on both
• the problem occurs in Project SJP (which I migrated from D/C), which is "company-managed". I cannot edit Epic links on child items, and there is no Change Parent option. The Epic Name is displayed when I create an Epic and appears in the right pane of child issues:

• In another Project called CRM (I created it recently and I am the admin), which is team-managed, the behavior is that the Change Parent option does appear in the dropdown and I can move a Task between Epics. However, in this Project there is no display of the Epic Name in the right pane at all. When I create an Epic in this Project, the Epic Name field is not displayed. 

I suspect that the defect is somehow related to the Projects being team-managed or company-managed, and perhaps some deficiency in Project templates for either (I will need to read documentation about project templates).

I see that it's not possible to change a Project from company-managed to team- managed - you have to create a new Project and move/copy all the work items.

Given that i bumped into the inability to change the Parent link in a Project migrated from Data Centre, it seems that this will bite a lot of people when they migrate to Cloud. 

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Simon Pearce and welcome to the Community!

It should be as simple as just clicking into the Parent field and either clicking the x icon there to remove the current parent or start typing to select a different parent.

If you want to modify details of the parent item itself, then you'll need to open that parent item itself and edit its details directly in the work item itself.

Can you be more specific as to what exactly you are trying to achieve, how you are trying to do this and what problems you experience when you try to do it that way? Not sure why you would use the command palette to change the parent of a work item.

Hope this helps!

[Walter Buggenhout]

You can quickly navigate to a work item's parent by clicking its issue key from the breadcrumbs at the top of your work item view, by the way:

[Simon Pearce]

Thanks for the warm welcome Walter!

Yes, I was expecting to hover over the Parent link in the right pane and click to edit it. Instead, when I click I am taken to the Parent.

When that happened I consulted documentation which suggest the Command Palette.

Edit the parent of a work item with your keyboard | Jira Cloud | Atlassian Support

[Walter Buggenhout]

In my instance, following those steps opens the following dialog:

Almost exactly the same behaviour as what I described in my reply, but indeed after pressing CMD+K on my mac keyboard. I don't use that feature from the command palette in real life myself, since I tend to pin the parent field to my pinned fields list on my work items, so I don't have to search for it on the screen.

The only scenario where I can imagine the command palette workaround to be useful, is if it is hard to locate the parent field on a busy screen ...