How to make categories & label names appear in alpha order on the drop down when creating an issue.

[Sherri Queen]

When creating an issue, we have categories and labels - both of which we use. I have noticed that both the categories and labels appear in the same order they are created. When used for creating another issue, it is necessary to scroll through all the categories and labels in order to find the one needed. 

This isn't difficult if you only have a couple of categories or labels, but we have quite a few and it would be more beneficial for these items to be in alphabetical order.

Is that possible?

Thanks,

Sherri

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Sherri Queen 

It appears that Atlassian is electing to not implement alphabetic sorting for Labels type fields.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-29861

[Sherri Queen]

Thank you.

[Sherri Queen]

Hi Trudy, one quick question... is it the same for categories?

Thanks!

[Trudy Claspill]

Are you using the built-in Categories field in a Work Management project? Or is Categories a custom field you added to a Software project?

If you are talking about Work Management project Categories, I have not found an issue about the sort order for those. You could ask your Jira Administrator to contact Atlassian Support directly to ask about that.

[Sherri Queen]

Thank you, I will. 
The category field is used by our company to list different groups of components so this is something we add in manually for each project. Sometimes, we have many different category types with a numbering system. So, it would be beneficial to have the drop down menu list the categories in alpha or numerical order.

Is there any way to arrange the category list in this manner?

[Trudy Claspill]

So, you are using a custom field that you have created and named "category". Is that correct?

Or are you using the built-in Category field that is available in Work Management projects?

If you are using a custom field that you created and named "category", what type of custom field is it? If it is a Labels type field, then the issue I referenced above applies, as it is for the built-in Labels field and any custom field of type Labels.

[Sherri Queen]

We are using the built-in Category field in the Jira Work Management software. When we add different component parts to the category field, we get a drop down menu that is shown below (it changes with each project). As you can see, sometimes it is hard to find the proper category.

[Trudy Claspill]

In that case I have not found anything about being able to manage the sort order of that field. It appears to be locked to the order in which the items were added to the list.

You could ask your Jira Administrator to contact Atlassian Support directly to ask about that.

[Sherri Queen]

Thank you for your help.

[Christopher Maxwell]

@Sherri Queen Trudy had some great advice here - reaching out to Atlassian Support is a good idea.

Another option is often plugins in the Jira Marketplace. However, I did some checking, and was not finding anything. I even reached out to the developers of Label Manager for Jira as it seemed liked their tool might allow sorting, but, alas, their tool does not allow sorting of labels.