Cascading field parent and child "Dropdown" controls

Summary

In Jira, you can have a custom field with custom field type “Select List (cascading)”, where there are parent and child values for the user to select from. This article walks through how to create dependent “Dropdown” controls in Atlassian Analytics that reference your cascading field.

Cascading fields are represented in the Atlassian Data Lake in the Jira “Issue field” table. The parent record will have (parent) appended to the field name, and the child record will have (child) appended to the field name, with its respective field values in subsequent rows.

For example, if you have a cascading field called “Cascade”, there will be one row with field name “Cascade (parent)” with the corresponding value, and separate rows with field name “Cascade (child)" and their corresponding values.

Solution

1. Create the parent “Dropdown” control

1. From your dashboard sidebar, select Control > Dropdown.

2. Select Switch to control editor.

3. Add the Value column from the Issue field table under “Jira family of products” to the Columns section and use the Group aggregation.

4. Add the Name column from the Issue field table to the Filters section and make it equal to the name of your field, with (parent) concatenated at the end. For example, my cascading field is called “Taxonomy”, so the value input is “Taxonomy (parent)”.

5. Optionally, rename your column to make it descriptive.

6. Name the “Dropdown” control to also have a descriptive name.

7. Click Save to dashboard to place your new “Dropdown” control on your dashboard.

2. Create the child “Dropdown” control

1. From your dashboard sidebar, select Control > Dropdown.

2. Select Switch to control editor.

3. Add the Issue ID, Name, and Value columns from the Issue field table under “Jira family of products” to the Columns section and use the Group aggregation for all three columns.

4. Add the Name column from the Issue field table to the Filters section and filter it to ‘is one of’ the names of both the parent and child field names.

   

5. Use a “Pivot” step to transform the parent and child fields into their own columns. Change the aggregates duplicates by option to “Auto”.

   

6. Add a “Filter” step to include rows where the parent column is equal to the parent “Dropdown”. For my example, this means it is filtering where “Taxonomy (parent) = {CASCADING_PARENT}”.

   

7. Hide the “Issue ID” and parent field columns, as they are no longer needed.

8. Finally, add a “Group & aggregate” step to group the child field values.

   

9. Name the “Dropdown” control to also have a descriptive name.

10. Click Save to dashboard to place your new “Dropdown” control on your dashboard.

Now you have your cascading field represented as dependent “Dropdown” controls!