How to identify forms and automations containing particular custom fields?

Question

We would like to change the names of some of our custom fields. We can see which projects the custom fields are used in, however, we don't know which forms, automations and workflows these custom fields are in.

Is there a way to gain an overview of where custom fields are used in Jira Cloud?

Emily Perridge · Answer

Hi @Wouter van den Berg

Thank you very much for sharing your valuable knowledge and providing some suggestions.

It's very helpful knowing that changing names of custom fields won't disrupt forms.

For the automations I got my Jira admin to send me a bulk export of all the automation rules. Once I had this file I used Ctrl+F to search for the custom fields.

Wouter van den Berg_xzpt7s · Answer

Hi @Emily Perridge

There could be some marketplace app out there that could help you with this that I don't know of. But I would do some JQL queries on the customfields you'd like to change to see if you can identify where these fields are used.

"yourcustomfieldname != empty"

Changing the name of the customfield itself will have no to little impact on forms

* Changing the name of a customfield will not break the link in forms and forms should always contain a label that is presented to the end user filling in the form;
* Installed apps might use naming instead of the customfield id that I am not aware of.

For automation there could be a regex or smartvalue used that is targeting the name of a customfield instead of the identifier. Normally you would use customfield_xxx in automation instead of the name but if a smart value is evaluated than you could have something like {{issue.customfieldname.get(0).value}}. So you have to be check if there are any evaluations done manually. Also take the outgoing webrequest into consideration as the JSON payload might have something linked to the name instead of the value.

You could also do an API call https://your-domain.atlassian.net/rest/api/3/field and exclude all custom=false from the webresponse but then you just have a list of all customfields and still don't know where it is used.