Extended Search is a new way to perform complex searches in Jira. It improves your search experience over Subqueries in the following ways:

✅ You can see the results immediately without any additional indexing steps.
✅ You can save the query as a Jira filter and use the filter everywhere in Jira.
✅ As with standard Jira filters, you can control the filter permissions.
✅ Saved filters perform better than Subqueries and are more reliable.

How do I start using new Extended Search functions?

There is an equivalent function for every Subquery JQL alias. The full list of available functions is listed on the Extended search page. Have a look at the next section to see the mapping between Subqueries JQL aliases and new functions. It’ll help you to create your new queries.

For example, if you previously created a subquery component=UI and you use it to find epics of issues that are a part of component UI:

epicOfQuery="component=UI"

you can find the same Jira issues with epicsOfChildrenInQuery function:

issue in epicsOfChildrenInQuery("component=UI")

The big difference is that you can use the nested query “component=UI” directly in your main query and without the need to create and index a subquery first. You can even narrow down you query further:

issue in epicsOfChildrenInQuery("component=UI") and project in (ACME, SP)

To use the query anywhere else in Jira, simply save it as a filter.

Functions mapping

The following table lists Subquery JQL aliases and their corresponding Extended Search functions. Use this mapping to migrate your subqueries.