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You're reading from JIRA 7 Essentials - Fourth Edition

Product typeBook

Published inNov 2016

Reading LevelBeginner

PublisherPackt

ISBN-139781786462510

Edition4th Edition

Languages

Java

Tools

JIRA

Concepts

Process Management

Author (1)

Patrick Li

Chapter 5. Field Management

Projects are collections of issues, and issues are collections of fields. As we have seen in the earlier chapters, fields are what capture data that can then be displayed to users. There are many different types of fields in JIRA, ranging from simple text fields that let you input alphanumeric texts, to more complicated fields with pickers to assist you with choosing dates and users.

An information system is only as useful as the data that goes into it. By understanding how to effectively use fields, you can turn JIRA into a powerful information system for data collection, processing, and reporting.

In this chapter, we will expand our Help Desk project with these customized fields and configurations, by exploring fields in detail and learning how they relate to other aspects of JIRA. By the end of this chapter, you will have learned the following:

Understanding built-in and custom fields
Collecting custom data through custom fields
Adding behaviors to fields with...

Built-in fields

JIRA comes with a number of built-in fields. You have already seen a few of them in the previous chapters. Fields such as summary, priority, and assignee are all built-in. They make up the backbone of an issue, and you cannot remove them from the system. For this reason, they are referred to as system fields.

The following table lists the most important built-in fields in JIRA:

Custom fields

While JIRA's built-in fields are quite comprehensive for basic general uses, most organizations soon find they have special requirements that cannot be addressed simply with the default fields available. To help you tailor JIRA to your organization's needs, JIRA lets you create and add your own fields to the system, called custom fields.

Custom field types

Every custom field belongs to a custom type, which dictates its behavior, appearance, and functionality. Therefore, when you add a custom field to JIRA, you really add another instance of a custom field type.

JIRA comes with over 20 custom field types that you can use straight out of the box. Many of the custom field types are identical to the built-in fields, such as date picker, which is like the due date field. They provide you with simplicity and flexibility that are not available with their built-in counterparts. The upcoming tables break down and list all the standard JIRA custom field types and their characteristics.

Standard fields

These fields are the most basic field types in JIRA. They are usually simple and straightforward to use, such as text field, which allows users to input any text:

System field	Description
Assignee	This specifies the user who is currently assigned to work on the issue.
Summary	This specifies a one-line summary of the issue.
Description	This provides a detailed description of the issue.
Reporter	This specifies the user who has reported this issue (although most of the time it is also the person who has created the issue, but not always).
Component/s	This specifies the project components the issue belongs to.
Effects Version/s	This specifies the versions the issue effects are found in.
Fix Version/s	This specifies the versions the issue will be...

Searchers

For any information system, capturing data is only half of the equation. Users will need to be able to retrieve the data at a later stage, usually through searching, and JIRA is no different. While fields in JIRA are responsible for capturing and displaying data, it is their corresponding searchers that provide the search functionality.

All fields that come with JIRA have searchers associated by default, so you will be able to search issues by their summary or assignee, without any further configuration. Some custom fields from third-party add-ons may have more than one searcher available. You can change the default searcher applied by editing the custom field.

Note

In JIRA UI, a searcher is referred to as a search template.

Custom field context

Built-in fields, such as priority and resolution, are global across JIRA. What this means is that these fields will have the same set of selections for all projects. Custom fields, on the other hand, are a lot more flexible.

Custom field types, such as select list and radio buttons, can have different sets of options for different projects or different issue types within the same project. This is achieved through what is called a custom field context.

A custom field context is made up of a combination of applicable projects and applicable issue types. When you are working with an issue, JIRA will check the project and issue type of the current issue to determine if there is a specific context that matches the combination. If one is found, JIRA will load the custom field with any specific settings such as selection options. However, if no context is found, the custom field will not be loaded.

Note

In JIRA, if no context can be found that matches the project and issue type...

Managing custom fields

Custom fields are used globally across JIRA, so you will need to have the JIRA Administrator global permission to carry out management operations such as creation and configuration.

JIRA maintains all the custom fields in a centralized location for easy management. Perform the following steps to access the custom field management page:

Log in as a JIRA administrator user.
Browse to the JIRA administration console.
Select the Issues tab and then the Custom fields option:

On the Custom Fields page, all the existing custom fields will be listed. From here, you can see the name of each custom field, their type, the context they belong to, and the screens they are displayed on.

Adding a custom field

Creating a new custom field is a multistep process, and JIRA provides a wizard to help you through it. There are two mandatory steps and an optional step when adding a new custom field. You need to first select the type of custom field, then its name, followed by options if you are...

Field configuration

As you have already seen, fields are used to capture and display data in JIRA. Fields can also have behaviors, which are defined by field configuration. For each field in JIRA, you can configure its behaviors listed as follows:

Field description: This is the description text that appears under the field when an issue is edited. With field configuration, you can have different description texts for different projects and issue types.
Visibility: This determines if a field should be visible or hidden.
Required: This specifies if a field will be optional or required to have a value when an issue is being created/updated. When applied to a select, checkbox, or radio button custom fields, this will remove the None option from the list.
Rendering: This specifies how the content is to be rendered for text-based fields (for example, wiki renderer or simple text renderer for text fields).

A field configuration provides you with control over each individual field in your JIRA, including...

Screens

In order for a field to be displayed when you view, create, or edit an issue, it needs to be placed onto a screen. You have already seen this when creating new custom fields. One of the steps in the creation process is to select what screens to add the custom field to. Screens will be discussed further in Chapter 6, Screen Management, so we will not spend too much time understanding them right now.

What you need to know for now is that after a field has been added to a screen, you can add it to additional screens or take it off completely. If you are working with just one field, you can configure it here from the field configurations. If you have multiple fields to update, a better approach will be to work directly with screens, as we will see in Chapter 6, Screen Management.

There is a subtle difference between hiding a field in field configuration and not placing a field on a screen. While the end result will be similar where in both cases the field will not show up, if you hide...

Field configuration scheme

With multiple field configurations, JIRA determines when to apply each of the configurations through the field configuration scheme. A field configuration scheme maps field configurations to issue types. This scheme can then be associated with one or more projects.

This allows you to group multiple field configurations mapped to issue types and apply them to a project in one go. The project will then be able to determine which field configuration to apply, based on the type of the issue. For example, for a given project, you can have different field configurations for bugs and tasks.

This grouping of configurations into schemes also provides you with the option to reuse existing configurations without duplicating work, as each scheme can be reused and associated with multiple projects.

Managing field configuration schemes

You can manage all your field configuration schemes from the View Field Configuration Schemes page. From there, you will be able to add, configure...

The HR project

Now that you have seen how to manage fields in JIRA, it is time to expand on our HR project. What we will do this time is add a few new custom fields to help capture some additional useful information. We will also create a customized field configuration specially designed for our HR team. Lastly, we will tie everything together by associating our fields, configurations, and projects through the field configuration schemes.

Setting up a custom field

Since you are implementing a project for HR, and we have created two issue types in the last chapter, New Employee and Termination. For the New Employee issue type, we will add a new custom field called Direct Manager, so when everything is completed, the manager can be notified that his/her new team member is ready to start. Since the manager is already in the organization, we will be using a user picker field, so JIRA will be able to automatically look up the user for us.

For our Termination issue type, we will also add a new custom...

Summary

In this chapter, we looked at fields in JIRA. We also looked at how JIRA is able to extend its ability to capture user data through custom fields. We explored how we can specify different behavior for fields under different contexts through the use of field configurations and schemes.

In the next chapter, we will expand on what we learned about fields by formally introducing you to screens, and how combining fields and screens provide users with the most natural and logical forms to assist them with creating and logging issues.

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Author (1)

Patrick Li

Patrick Li is the cofounder of AppFusions and works as a senior engineer there, specializing in integration solutions with many enterprise applications and platforms, including IBM Connections, Jive, Google Apps, and more. He has worked in the Atlassian ecosystem for over 10 years, developing products and solutions for the Atlassian platform and providing expert consulting services. He has authored many books and video courses covering Jira. He has extensive experience in designing and deploying Atlassian solutions from the ground up and customizing existing deployments for clients across verticals such as healthcare, software engineering, financial services, and government agencies.
Read more about Patrick Li

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Custom field type	Description
`Date Picker`	These are input fields that allow input with a date picker and enforce valid dates.
`Date Time Picker`	These are input fields...