You can schedule issue due dates in Jira Service Management to help your agents prioritize incoming customer requests and find overdue issues that need urgent attention. The powerful scheduling feature allows you to perform fixed and relative date searches based on specific due dates as well as arbitrary search periods. You can also perform advanced searches using Jira Query Language.

Scheduling an issue

To schedule an issue, populate its Due date field. This can be done either when creating an issue, or at a later stage by editing the issue.

Searching by due date

You can use either basic search or advanced search to search for issues by their Due Date.

Using simple search

You can search for issues using the search form in Issue Navigator (see Searching for Issues). There are two ways to search for issues based on the Due date field. The first way is using fixed date values, the second is using periods that are relative to the current date.

Fixed date searches

There are two text fields in the search form that allow searching based on the Due date field.

• To search for all issues that are due after a certain date, enter the date in the Due After text field. For example, to find all issues that are due after 1st June 2010, enter 1-6-2010 in the Due After field. You can also use the Calendar popup to select a date by clicking the calendar icon to the right of the field.

• To search for issues that are due before a certain date, enter the date in the Due Before text field. For example, to find all issues that are due before 1st July 2010, enter 1-7-2010 in the Due Before field.

To search for issues that are due between two dates, populate both the Due After and the Due Before fields.

Relative period search

It is possible to perform a search that is relative to the time when it is run. For example, it is possible to do a search for issues that are due seven days from now. To do this, enter 7d in the Due Date To text field of the Issue Navigator. If the search is saved and run the next day, the issues that are due in seven days from the time that the search is run will be retrieved. Thus, this search will find all issues that are due within a week every time it is run.

The values that are entered in the Due Date From and Due Date To fields have to conform to a special syntax (described below). However, it is also possible to use the Due Date popup by clicking the icon to the right of the Due Date To text field to specify the search period.

Due Date Popup

Use the Due Date popup to do the following:

• To search for issues that are overdue at the time of the search, select the first radio button, and click OK.
• To search for issues that are overdue by more than a certain number of days, populate the text field in the second row, and click OK.
• To search for issues that are due in the next certain amount of days, and are not overdue at the time of the search, populate the text field in the third row with the number of days, and choose and not from the select box in the third row. Select the third radio button, and click OK.
• To search for issues that are due in the next certain amount of days, and are overdue at the time of the search, populate the text field in the third row with the number of days, and choose and from the select box in the third row. Select the third radio button, and click OK.
• The fourth row of the popup is used for arbitrary period searches. Use the to text field to specify the upper bound of the search, and the from text field to specify the lower bound of the search. A blank text field means no bound. Populating the text fields in the fourth row actually has the same effect as populating the Due Date From and Due Date To text boxes. The syntax is described below.

Relative Period Search Syntax

The Due Date From and Due Date To fields use a special syntax to denote time period bounds. The syntax uses numbers and abbreviations that follow the numbers to represent what the numbers actually mean. The abbreviations are "w" for weeks, "d" for days, "h" for hours, and "m" for minutes. For example, to specify 10 days in the future, use "10d" or "1w and 3d". To specify a period bound in the past, prefix the value with the "-" sign. For example, to specify 2 days, 4 hours, and 3 minutes ago, use "-2d 4h 3m".

Using advanced search

You can also use Jira Query Language (JQL) to search for issues by due date — see Advanced Searching, and particularly the documentation on the Due field.