Child Extend agent

A Child Extend Sync Agent walks the parent/child relationship in Jira and pulls each issue’s children into your lens. Use it alongside a JQL Insert to build the classic Epic → Story → Sub-task tree without maintaining anything by hand.

For example: pair a JQL Insert that pulls every Epic in your program with a Child Extend that pulls each Epic’s Stories, and you have a live, two-level portfolio view.

Add a Child Extend agent

1. Open the lens and open the Inspector panel.
2. In the Sync Agents section, click Add Sync Agent.
3. From the Type dropdown, pick Child Extend.
4. Set Depth — how many levels down to walk:
   • 1 — pull direct children only (recommended)
   • 2 — pull children and grandchildren
   • 3+ — rarely needed; use with care on deep hierarchies
5. Click Save.

The agent runs against every issue already in the parent’s subtree and adds each issue’s children underneath it.

How depth works

Depth is measured from the issue, not from the root of the lens:

• Depth 1 on an Epic pulls its Stories.
• Depth 1 on a Story pulls its Sub-tasks.
• Depth 2 on an Epic pulls Stories and their Sub-tasks.

Ordering with JQL Insert

Sync Agents run in a fixed pipeline order: Insert runs before Extend. So even if you add Child Extend first in the Inspector, it will wait for JQL Insert to populate issues before walking their children. You don’t need to worry about ordering — just add what you need.

Note

Child Extend only works for issues that are already in the subtree. If you want to pull every child across a whole project, start with a JQL Insert of the parents, then add Child Extend underneath.

When not to use it

• If you want linked issues (via issue links), use the Linked Items Sync Agent instead.
• If you want to reconstruct a full multi-level hierarchy from a flat query, use the Hierarchy Builder Sync Agent — it’s a single agent that walks the native Jira hierarchy from a JQL result set.

Related

• JQL Insert agent
• What are Sync Agents?
• Run & schedule agents