Atlassian’s JIRA is a highly effective tool for overseeing your projects, workflows, and tasks. One of its strongest capabilities is the JIRA Query Language (JQL), which enables you to personalize your issue searches to a high level. In this article, we will guide you through how to utilize JQL to its fullest potential, even if you are new to it.
What is JIRA Query Language (JQL)?
JQL is a flexible, SQL-like language specifically designed to help you search for issues within JIRA. By correctly using JQL, you can quickly find the precise issues you’re interested in and make your workflow more efficient.
Starting With Basic JQL Queries
Let’s start with some straightforward examples. To search for all issues assigned to a specific user, you’d use the following syntax:
assignee = johnsmith
This would return all issues where the assignee is “johnsmith”. The “=” operator checks for equality, and you can use other operators like “!=” (not equal), “>” (greater than), “<” (less than), among others, depending on your needs.
Designing Complex JQL Queries
For more complex queries, you can combine multiple conditions using logical operators such as AND and OR. For instance, to find all issues assigned to “johnsmith” and have a priority of “high”, you’d write:
assignee = johnsmith AND priority = high
Note that JQL is not case sensitive, but values (like usernames or issue keys) often are.
Using JQL Functions
JQL also comes with built-in functions, which can help you make more complex queries. For instance, the currentUser() function returns the currently logged-in user. So, if you want to find all unresolved issues assigned to the current user, you’d use:
assignee = currentUser() AND resolution = Unresolved
Wrapping Up
There’s a lot more to JQL than we’ve covered here, including using ORDER BY to sort your results, using IS and IS NOT to check for empty fields, among others. But hopefully, this post has given you a good starting point for your own experiments with JQL. Happy querying!
