The Secrets of JQL Everyone Wished They Knew - DZone (2025)

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Filter on Users currentUser() membersOf() Date Filtering startOf…() endOf…() now() lastLogin() Filter on Tasks Many More Questions/Problems?

JIRA Software is a cool tool, but what makes it even cooler is its powerful search features. By now, you have probably already discovered JIRA Query Language (JQL) and learned the basics, but here are some of my favorite tips and commands that I use all the time in JQL — what I call the secret powers of JQL.

Filter on Users

currentUser()

What if you would like to find all issues to which you’ve been assigned? This is basically all the work that you are expected to do. Good to know, right?

You can use the JQL functioncurrentUser()for this:

assignee = currentUser()

This filter works not only for you but it’ll work for others, too, if you change the value currentUser() to the user’s name. If you save this filter and make it available to others, they’ll be able to see all issues that have been assigned to them.

membersOf()

You could do the same for all members of a certain squad, team, or group. The most important thing to note here is the use ofINinstead of=.

assignee INmembersOf(“Collaboration Squad”)

This will show you all the tickets assigned to members of a team, so you can see how much work they have on their plates.

Date Filtering

In the article about history searches, we covered many ways of filtering by using dates. Most of the examples were using static dates. But Atlassian has a set of functions to support dynamic date filtering as well.

Static dates represent a specific moment in time, like, “give me all the issues created on the 1st of January 2017.” Dynamic dates represent the time period you determine; for example, “give me all the issues created 5 days ago.”

startOf…()

These functions are particularly helpful if you are querying for a certain period. For example, all issues created within this week. Where you could use a combination startOfWeek() and endOfWeek():

created > startOfWeek() and created < endOfWeek()

Or even more advanced, if you’d like only issues created in the current workweek:

created > startOfWeek(1d) and created < endOfWeek(-1d)

There’s a couple of helpful functions for ‘startOf…’.

startOfDay()
startOfWeek()
startOfMonth()
startOfYear()

The following example gives you all issues that were created this year:

endOf…()

The same functions exist for the end of a day, week, month, or year:

endOfDay()
endOfWeek()
endOfMonth()
endOfYear()

now()

This command will show you a list of all issues that were due up until now and not just today. Catch up on any work that may have slipped through the cracks!

Thenow()function refers to the current date and time and is often used for filtering on the due date:

due <= now()

lastLogin()

If you want to keep track of all the issues that have been created or updated since you last logged in, you could use this function:

created >= lastLogin() OR updated >= lastLogin()

Filter on Tasks

Perhaps you want to search for tasks on Kanban boards or a Scrum backlog. A Kanban/Scrum board itself is backed by an existing JQL filter.

If you know the filter’s name or id you can do the following and add extra clauses to get a more specific result:

filter = 123456 AND …

Or...

filter = ‘Filter Name’ AND …

Many More

These are just a handful of available functions that I use all the time. To find a complete list, check out the JIRA documentation site.

Questions/Problems?

If you haven’t yet, check out our blog series on JQL:

Or, ask me a question in the Atlassian Community.

Filter (software) scrum Jira (software) Query language History (command) Command (computing) Task (computing) Database