Several parents for one subtask

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Yulia Svirskaya
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Hi! Is it possible to have multiple parents for 1 subtask? Our use case is that we need to have one and the same task to be present in two different Agile Boards (one is for delivery and another one is a control center for tasks of a certain type). Swimlanes for both Agile Boards are based on Features. 

STR are as follows: 
- I create task in CC board in a particular swimlane and it becomes subtask of that particular swimlane 

- Then, the task appears in the development board in Uncategorised 

- when I move this task to a particular swimlane in development board and the previous link to swimlane (subtask of) is replaced with the new one 

- the task is now in uncategorized in CC board

So, I see the following possible ways to resolve that conflict, however, not sure whether it is possible: 
- multiple parents for one and the same subtask? 
- possibility to customize link types used for agile boards aggregation? 

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Lena Vostrikova
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Hello,
I'm Lena from the YouTrack Team. 
I'm afraid both approaches are not supported. You can create a copy of the issue, link it to the original one and have different parents for two issues. After that, you will be able to create a workflow which will automatically synchronize these two cards.
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Yulia Svirskaya
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This is quite a dirty workaround. Why not let the issue have multiple parents? I have terribly many questions to YT PO team )))

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Lena Vostrikova
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Hello Yulias,

Thank you for your non-indifference. We really appreciate that. Let me explain the current situation. 

The parent-subtask relationship has been explicitly designed to allow only one parent. Many things in YouTrack are built on top of that:

  • Issue lists offer a tree-like view that is impossible to build when many parents are allowed. 
  • The time tracking feature uses parent-subtask trees to calculate cumulative estimates and spent time.  
  • As for the Agile boards, they can use parents as swimlanes and subtasks as cards. You mentioned that adding the ability to change the aggregation link type for the swimlanes will help you. It will not be a solution because the Agile boards don't allow displaying one issue in different swimlanes on one board. 

Having multiple parents here will obviously introduce ambiguity.

One can argue that all these cases could be redesigned to support multiple parents. While true, it would require reimplementing a substantial part of YouTrack from scratch. So the possible benefits don't even remotely justify the costs. Especially given that, for most cases, it's possible to define your own link types with any kind of desired behaviour.

Please let me know if you have some questions left. I will do my best to address them.

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