Inserter/Extender Duplicates Filter

When you build a structure using both Insert and Extend generators, there is a chance you will wind up with duplicate issues – the Inserter/Extender Duplicate filter allows you to quickly remove those duplicate issues from your structure.

Here's how this can happen:

1. You use an Insert generator to add every Story from a current project. Those stories are added to the the top level of your structure.
2. You then use the Linked Issues Extenderto add issues linked to those stories - these issues will be placed below your existing stories in the structure.
3. If any of the original stories are linked to each other, they will appear more than once in your structure – at the top level (because they were added by the inserter) and as children of other issues (because they were added again by the extender).

The Inserter/Extender Duplicate Filter will remove such issues from the top level and only keep the children. Please see examples below for a more detailed explanation.

Examples

Basic Links

Imagine we have a project with issues Story 1, Story 2, Story 3, and Story 4, and some of the issues are blocking other issues:

• Story 1 is blocked by Story 2
• Story 2 is blocked by Story 3 and Story 4

In our structure, we want to see all issues from our project arranged based on the existing "Blocks" links.

After you add all four issues by a JQL Inserter and add a Links Extender, you will get the following hierarchy:

You can see that some issues have been duplicated, because the Extender adds the children under parents, even if they are already in the structure.

Now let's add the Duplicates Filter:

As a result, we get a structure with the hierarchy and no duplicates:

Multiple Parents

We have the same situation as in the example above, but we have one story that blocks two other stories, so it should be shown under both of them:

• Story 1 is blocked by Story 2 and Story 3
• Story 2 and Story 3 are blocked by Story 4

Without Duplicate Filter, it looks like this:

With the filter applied, any identical instances are removed:

In this example, Story 4 still appears twice – this is because these two instances are not identical. One is blocking Story 2, while the other is blocking Story 3. Both need to be expressed in the hierarchy.

Link Cycles

If there are link cycles between the issues (both issues link to each other), the Duplicates Filter will remove one of the branches and keep the other, to make sure all the issues added by the Insert and Extend generators are in the structure.

In this example, Story 1 blocks Story 2 and Story 2 blocks Story 1.

Without the filter, we get the following structure:

With the filter, one of the branches with the cycle gets removed: