Jira Connected Sheet and Hierarchy re-arrangement

josh87861

Hi-

 

I have been doing some searching on the community and cannot find a clear reason or explanation as to how to to set up the "Optional: Define Row Groups"

I cannot find any documentation or help videos on YouTube or the community that explains how this works.  

 

Here is a screenshot of my sample project

 

Here is what each letter represents

A) This indicates a locked field and as you can see in the letter "D" those locked fields are items that I do NOT want to sync to Jira as they don't really make sense in the sense of Milestones

This will represent the Issue Key once the sync is performed with Jira

C) This field I was trying to use to logically Group by Department in hopes that I can use that field to "Define Row Groups"  This is not an option when setting up the Row Groups.  It seems that these are fields pulled from Jira.  I can delete this field as it seems a bit redundent and did not provide any useful method of being able to group rows by.

D) Represents what issues I want to be synced between Smartsheets and Jira

E) Is the Epic Name which I think needs to be populated inside Smartsheets and I can see if I exclude all Row Grouping attempts that will write to Jira.

 

How do I format this in a way that when I sync to Jira it does not re-arrange the rows.

 

BEFORE I CONNECT JIRA THIS IS WHAT MY SHEET LOOKS LIKE.

 

HERE IS WHAT HAPPENS AFTER I CONNECT IT TO JIRA

HERE ARE MY CONFIGURATION SETTINGS

 

 

I'm not sure what is happening here and why these rows keep getting re-arranged.  Ive tried different configurations but I'm getting stumped and the documentation is not clear as to how to resolve this issue.

 

The tickets when created in Jira work for the most part except for the epics not showing the storys underneath them.  Here is that view as well.

Any advice here on how to resolve these issues I am experiencing.  I think this is pretty close but still not working the way in which we desire.

 

Thanks!

Nathan Lloyd

Hi Josh,

Automated Workflows in the Jira Connector will automatically re-order any row sorting you configure in the sheet manually due to the "Filtered Row Finder" process which runs on the backend. This is responsible for searching the sheet and moving any filtered Jira Issues into a hierarchy named "Filtered out by connector - not synced". We have some information on this here: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/2476121-jira-workflows#troubleshooting

The only option with automated workflows for sorting will be to use the Row Grouping options in the Workflow wizard. It looks like you're configuration is only using Jira hiearchy at the moment ("Maintain Jira hierachy...") and doesn't include any other grouping options, so you'll see issues synced in ordered by the ID key with and child issues synced in beneath the parent.

For your use case, you might consider using a manual Workflow to sync changes back to Jira. This would require you to run the Workflow manually in the Jira Connector but since the Filtered Row Finder doesn't run on those, you shouldn't have issues with the sheet becoming resorted.

Alternatively, you'll need to use row grouping to find the best desired result. Please see the available information here: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/2479486-keep-related-issues-together-with-smartsheet-hierarchy

To address point E, this is also covered in the above artilcle:

• If your Issue Key field is mapped to a column that is not the Primary Column in the sheet, you will not be able to create new issues from Smartsheet while Row Grouping is enabled.

From your screenshots it looks like the Issue Key column is not the Primary Column in the sheet, so you wouldn't be able to create new Jira issues while row grouping was enabled.

Please feel free to submit an Enhancement Request for added support for manual sorting in sheets using automated workflows.

You're welcome to submit a case with Smartsheet Support also to get this questions reviewed by the support team.

Kind regards,

Nathan L.