Hierarchy view in GitHub Projects [Public Preview]

[ebndev]

Hierarchy view for GitHub Projects is now available in public preview. You can now view your full issue hierarchy directly in project table views, giving you clear visibility into complex work breakdowns without losing context or switching views.

🔗 What is hierarchy view?

Hierarchy view lets you see the full nesting of sub-issues directly in GitHub Projects.

hierarchy_view.mp4

With hierarchy view enabled, you can:

• Expand and collapse sub-issues up to eight levels deep.
• Group, slice, sort, and filter while preserving hierarchy.
• View and quickly add existing sub-issues that aren’t in the project yet.

Getting started

To enable hierarchy view, open the View menu and turn on Show hierarchy.

Coming soon

We’re continuing to invest in hierarchy view. Next up:

• The ability to create and add sub-issues inline, directly from the project.
• The ability to drag-and-drop reordering and reparenting of sub-issues.
• A synced order between the sub-issue list on issues and the sub-issue list in projects.

[hdm12345]

Thanks for this feature!! I am very happy about it. I do have two points of feedback:

1. In Project view I currently filter out completed and aborted items, using "-status:Completed, Aborted". This works for issues, but currently with the hierarchy view, it does not filter out sub-issues. Could this be introduced as a separate feature or filter option?

2. It would be great if sub-issues stayed open when the page is reloaded, currently they collapse again on reload. A collapse or open all sub-issues would be great as well.

Thanks in advance.

[evi-liu]

Thanks for the helpful feedback! We’re actively exploring both the ability to filter out closed sub-issues and preserving the expand/collapse state.

These are improvements we’re hoping to deliver in the coming weeks :).

[vfportero]

This is a MUST feature!!

[MantisClone]

How to get "Epic" Issue Type, as shown in the video??

[MantisClone]

nvm. Found it: https://github.com/organizations/[organization]/settings/issue-types

[jeremy-farrance]

This is fantastic, really useful for us! But why is this being worked on, when a very related, needed, highly demanded, and obviously missing feature has been left untouched since Dec 2021?

Sort by "last updated", "created"

#8518

[flavienbwk]

Indeed, absolutely crazy to see that while the "created" sorting isn't available yet... What a basic yet essential feature.

[azenMatt]

This is coming next 😄

[jeremy-farrance]

Wait, really?

[aikenka]

This is great, really useful!

Would love to see this enabled in Roadmap view as well!

[justinrobots]

Does this only work when you create and filter by something like Epics in the example given? In a table of all issues in an iteration, I see sub issues nested under their parent, but the same sub issues are duplicated again at the parent level.

[evi-liu]

For those using the no:parent-issue filter, how’s it working for you so far? Does it give you the view(s) you’re looking for?

[cvennel-via]

@evi-liu I'm setting up a new project board using no:parent-issue and it lets me get just what I want to see. One small annoyance is I'm trying to order a backlog and the sub-issues within the parent issue based on priority/dependency manually. I can drag and re-order the top level, but to re-order the issues within a parent I have to open a second view focused on just issues with that parent. It would be nice if the drag handles let me order sub-issues as well in the one view.

edit: I just saw that the Coming Soon section mentions exactly what I was requesting 🤦

[Cleve-machine]

@evi-liu the no:parent-issue filter, or the -no:parent-issue does not resolve the original post issue.
The key issue here is that when Task items are nested under a Feature, or and Epic, they then appear in two places:

1. under the parent item, and
2. again as their own row item.

The option of using no:parent-issue does not really work if you have multiple levels of nesting.
The option of filtering out a 'Type' is better, but still not elegant.
The preferable solution would be that nested items did not appear as a duplicate row. That could even just be a toggle switch for the view if needed.

[evi-liu]

Thanks all for the feedback on this! We are currently working on de-duplicating the items by default. Stay tuned 👀

[Shifkan04]

It means GitHub Projects now supports viewing issue hierarchies (parent–child relationships) directly in table view, making it easier to manage complex work breakdowns and see progress without switching views.

[dbeaum0nt]

This is fantastic and was sorely needed. Please add this functionality to roadmap pages as well, it is desperately needed to make roadmaps viable because without hierarchical sorting it is impossible to make an effective roadmap.

[dominicafonso-datum]

Only realised today that roadmap hierarchy wasn't included when table view hierarchy was released. Is there a workaround for the roadmap to force a heirarchy-like layout?

[ohiosveryown]

Great to see this ☺️.

[joepavitt-esp]

Just to echo the above comments, this is so greatly appreciated as a new feature, the only gripe I've seen is the duplicate issue problem.

Whilst the filter approach works somewhat, it's not reliable as we often have valid tasks that are isolated in nature, and therefore do not have a parent issue. Using the filter approach means we also lose these items when wanting the hierarchy view.

[evi-liu]

Duly noted. We are currently working to solve the duplicate issue problem. Stay tuned!

[Cleve-machine]

@evi-liu An additional issue I have found is that if you are relying on a filter to remove the duplicate items in hierarchy view, then you can't drag and drop child items into an order. You can only drag top level items that have an issue number.
This is actually quite a major drawback.

IMO the end goal here is to have a tree of items which you can drag and drop into an order. (Assuming there is no sort applied.)

[evi-liu]

Thanks for the feedback! Solving the duplicate items and supporting drag and drop are both coming very soon :)

[janettelomeland]

Thanks for creating hierarchies, a wish is the possibility to save that all should expanded or collapsed. Now it is set to collapsed and it is needed to expand one by one.

[acherpillod]

Hierarchy view for GitHub Projects is now available in public preview. You can now view your full issue hierarchy directly in project table views, giving you clear visibility into complex work breakdowns without losing context or switching views.

🔗 What is hierarchy view?

Hierarchy view lets you see the full nesting of sub-issues directly in GitHub Projects.
hierarchy_view.mp4

With hierarchy view enabled, you can:

* Expand and collapse sub-issues up to eight levels deep.

* Group, slice, sort, and filter while preserving hierarchy.

* View and quickly add existing sub-issues that aren’t in the project yet.

Getting started

To enable hierarchy view, open the View menu and turn on Show hierarchy.

Coming soon

We’re continuing to invest in hierarchy view. Next up:

* The ability to create and add sub-issues inline, directly from the project.

* The ability to drag-and-drop reordering and reparenting of sub-issues.

* A synced order between the sub-issue list on issues and the sub-issue list in projects.

The 'hierarchy view' is present in the 'Board' layout, but should be present in the 'Roadmap' layout as well to ease planning view and decision making.

[ScrappyXII]

please add back the ability to see "duplicate" items. This was a breaking change from prior versions and there is no option to choose whether you want the old or new behavior (show or hide).

[aikenka]

Seconding the ask for "duplicate" items.

The main, unexpanded listing should be able to include any items that match the filter query.

[furrysachin]

Here’s a clean, original reply you can post:

---

This is a really useful addition, especially for teams managing complex work structures.

One thing I noticed while testing hierarchy view is that it greatly improves visibility, but it also introduces some workflow challenges depending on how Projects are structured:

• Filtering becomes tricky when parent + sub-issues both matter in different contexts
• Duplication handling can affect how backlog or milestone views are interpreted
• Expand/collapse state reset can slow down navigation in large hierarchies

💡 Suggestion

It would be really helpful if GitHub added:

• A toggle for “show duplicates” vs “clean hierarchy view”
• Option to persist expanded state per view permanently
• Better export support that preserves hierarchy structure

Overall though, this is a strong step forward for planning and breaking down work more clearly. Just needs a bit more control for real-world project workflows.

---

If you want, I can also make you a shorter 2–3 line reply version for quick commenting 👍

[jacob-carlborg]

Something changed recently. I don't know if it's the deduplication or if the hierarchy view interacts poorly with the "slice by" feature we're also using. We want to show a hierarchy and slice by issue type. The issue types forms a hierarchy. This is how the "slice by" column look like with hierarchy view turned off:

And with hierarchy view turned on:

They used to show the same data. The hierarchy goes as follows: Project -> Epic -> Feature -> Story. The issues are connected as sub-issues.

[MakePixelsWork]

Yes, its annoying, but logic. Your Epic -> Feature -> Story are children of Project, so if you enable hierarchy, it only shows the types that are the topmost hierarchical items. In your example, you still have 5 Story and 3 No Type issues that aren't children of any other type and this is why they show up in the sliced list.

[jacob-carlborg]

Is it due to deduplication? Because it initially worked the way I want it to work.

[MakePixelsWork]

We can't filter out items that have a certain state.

We usually use -is:closed and -status:Done to filter out those items that are either closed issues, or issues that have the Done status. Sometimes Closed issues do not have the Done status, and vice-versa, so we do both.

This works in a normal view, but when we enable a nested hierarchical view, the closed issues reappear. They are still shown. Only those that are the topmost items are filtered out, I assume. But since most issues are nested and thus inside an Epic, which we rarely close, we would also like Done and Closed items to be filtered out when they are in a nested view.

Can this be fixed?

[ekalin]

How did you add the icons for each issue type? Is there a way to get them automatically, or it is just an icon in in title of each issue?

[MakePixelsWork]

...or it is just an icon in in title of each issue?

Its just an icon I add to each issue. It is however possible to automate this with Actions. I read it somewhere, but as I'm the PO of the product and already have to type lots of issues titels and their info, I don't mind doing the extra work of adding the icon. You just type : and then the rest of the icon name you want, press enter and you get the emoticons GitHub uses.

Here is a screenshot of the icons I find useful for their specific project issue / filter. Feel free to use them in your own projects. Screenshot is for Windows 11 users. Icons are different on Windows 10

--
PS: People often comment that they find it extremely annoying one can't automate some of these things, but don't realize they also need to manually input the data and assign values to each issue, so adding an extra icon is just one of those steps.

[ekalin]

It's slightly inconvenient in that one needs to select the type (for proper filtering) and add the icon, but it's not a huge issue. I guess issue templates could help, at least for creating new items.

[dominicafonso-datum]

it also looks like archived child issues are shown in the hierarchy view.

[dominicafonso-datum]

@evi-liu will we be getting proper hierarchy display inside the roadmap view? I haven't found this discussed anywhere yet.

[linde-ibis]

I enabled it in some views but turned it off after a while. Main gripes:

• In personal to do lists some issues weren't showing because the parent issue wasn't assigned to the same person
• Filters applied don't work on the nested issues (e.g. not wanting to see closed issues)
• No ability to save a 'Fully expanded' view

[aikenka]

Please add a toggle for “show duplicates” vs “clean hierarchy view” - when originally released, hierarchy view showed items inline if they matched the filter query, and showed as children if they were children of any item matching the filter query.

Also it was apparent duplication, it was actually quite useful in our case - we assign epics and tasks to individuals, and have a scrum view that includes both, grouped by assignee:

• tasks, naturally, assignees want to see in their task list
• epic owners on our team also like to have their epics listed, so they're not bouncing between views

Even if it were tasks / sub-tasks we'd have the same use case - overall work owner would like visibility to the progress of the main body of work, and assignee of the specific work item should see their work item in their task list.

We've sadly turned off hierarchy view in the interim, it just doesn't work for our use case.

[aikenka]

Noticing some odd behaviour with duplicate line items (and reiterating the ask for "show duplicates" option requested a few times here, since investigation into this issue may lend itself to that feature request as well 😄)

I have 2 items which are currently showing up both as individual line items, and as children of a parent. All other items are listed only once on the board. So it's inconsistently showing some issues once, and others duplicated.

I believe this is the sequence leading up to where I'm at -

• I have an unfiltered "everything" view, with hierarchy turned on
• I parented 2 items in the view to an issue that was not yet in the project
• I added the parent issue to the project
• the children are still showing up as individual line items, AND as children of the newly-added parent issue

Tried a couple things to fix with no luck:

• refresh / force-refresh browser page / incognito window
• turn hierarchy off/on for the view

What did fix:

• removed children items from project, then added them back in again from the option under the parent