Unable to update a field as it says Locked

[Christina King]

I'm not sure if this is part of the error reported yesterday, but I am unable to update a field. It says "locked". I was able to edit it before. 

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Christina King 

Are you talking about changing the value of a field within a work item?

Or are you talking about changing the configuration of a field through Jira Administration > Work Items > Fields ?

Can you tell us the steps you are executing? Can you provide screen images to show us what you see?

Typically you would see that a field has the "Locked" lozenge only through Jira Administration > Work Items > Fields . Locked fields are special fields provided by Jira for which you are not allowed to change the configuration. But you should still be able to set values for (most) locked fields within individual work items.

If you can share your steps and screen images that will help us understand what you are trying to do and enable us to offer better advice.

[Christina King]

Good morning. Thank you for replying back. We had a custom field for components, and it looks like it is now being treated as a Jira managed field. I'm trying to add new options to this field, but it is locked. 

[Trudy Claspill]

Can you provide a screen image from the Fields page showing that custom field? Example:

Atlassian provides a built in field named Components and that field is Locked, and has a special Field Type of "Components".

That field is used in Company Managed projects for the Components feature. The Components tab within each project is the only location where you can add values for the Locked Components field.

Jira does not prevent creation of custom fields that have identical names to existing fields. If you have created a second custom field and named it Components it should show up in the Fields list separately without the Locked lozenge, and that one you should be able to edit from Fields.

[Christina King]

Thank you. I was able to figure it out. 

[Trudy Claspill]

Great! Can you share with us what you discovered?

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski]

Hi Christina,

when a field shows “Locked” in Jira Cloud it usually means it’s a system field or an app-managed field, so Jira won’t let admins change its configuration (and sometimes you can’t edit it the same way as before).

A couple quick checks:

1. Where do you see “Locked”?

• If it’s in Admin → Issues → Custom fields next to the field name, that typically means the field is owned by Jira or a Marketplace app and can’t be edited/unlocked in Cloud.
• If it’s on the issue itself (you can’t change the value), then it’s more likely one of these changed:

       2.  your permissions (lost “Edit issues”),

• the issue is in a status that restricts editing,
• or the field is no longer on the Edit screen / is controlled by an app.