Create a dynamic number of Jira issues

The need: use a field to determine how many Jira issues to create

When processes need to be automated, it is quite rare to know in advance exactly how many steps will be required, or how many issues will need to be created. For example, in an onboarding process, you may want to create specific tasks depending on how many services a new employee belongs to. Dynamism is key.

The solution: create issues dynamically with Elements Copy & Sync

With Elements Copy & Sync, you can define dynamic recipes which lets you create several Jira issues. The number of issues created is completely dynamic, and based on values from the source issue of the recipe. These values can come from many different custom fields, such as labels, components, user pickers, checkboxes, group pickers, select lists, or version pickers, which gives you many different ways to automate your issues creation.

Watch a demo of dynamic issue creation for employee onboarding

Tutorial

This guide explains how to set up a recipe that will create one issue for each component in a source issue.
These issues will all have distinct "Summary" values that will inherit the name of one component from the source issue.

In this example, we will trigger the recipe from an issue with the key SUP-1. This issue has three components : "Payroll Services", "Financial Services", and "Data Center Services".

Prerequisites

A recipe called "Create an issue for each service" has been created, activated, and is available on issue SUP-1.

Configuration steps

1 - As a Jira administrator, go to the "Elements Copy & Sync Cloud" administration and click on Recipes in the navigation bar.

2 - In the Recipes listing page, select "Create an issue for each service" in the Active Recipes list.

3 - Click on the Target step in the navigation menu.

4 - In the "Number of targets" section, click on the Create a dynamic number of issues option.

5 - In the "Issues to create" section, in the Primary field option, select the field that will be used to decide how many issues will be created by the recipe.
In our example, we will use the "Components" field. This means that the recipe will create one issue for each component in the source issue (in our case, there are three components, so three issues will be created).

At this point, the recipe is ready to be used, it will create issues dynamically based on a number of components.
However, we want to go a bit further : we will set a specific summary for each of these issues, based on the components.

6 - Click on the Content step in the navigation menu.

7 - Enable the Set and synchronize fields option, then select "Summary" in the Add target field option.

9 - In the Fields Mapping table, click on the "..." button and select Set a dynamic value.

10 - Use the Insert value from source issue option to open a pop-up, then select Primary field value. 

This mean that the value from the primary field in the source issue will be used as the value for the "Summary" field in each created issue. In our case, the three issues created will have "Payroll Services", "Financial Services", and "Data Center Services" as their respective summaries.

You can also add a static value in around the dynamic value to create the exact summaries you need : 

In this example, the three issues created will have "Specific summary for Payroll Services", "Specific summary for Financial Services", and "Specific summary for Data Center Services" as their respective summaries.

11 - Save the recipe.

Result

With these steps, when the recipe is triggered from issue SUP-1, three issues will be automatically created, one for each component in SUP-1. Their summaries will be specific and contain the name of each component.

You can also trigger this recipe with a workflow post-function to automatically create these issues each time the status of an issue changes, or use an Automation trigger to do the same thing.

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