JIRA Custom Fields with complex objects instead of simple types?

Question

Hi,

I'm looking for a plugin (or other solution) that allows us to add complex custom fields. One example could be issues with a custom field "printer type", where the user can select the type of printer he or she has a problem with. A printer object should comprise several attributes such as black/white vs. color printer, paper size, vendor, etc.

We want to use this in order to create reports, e.g. all issues with color printers in 2014. This is just one example. We have lots of similar use cases.

So far, I have had a look at plugins such as CRM plugin or Insight, which seem to be useful for some of our use cases. However, we would prefer a more generic solution, so that we are able to create arbitrary objects. I also found out about Atlassian Active Objects, but this seems to be targeted at developers instead of users.

I'm also thinking about using an external ORM solution, e.g. Ruby on Rails ActiveRecord in combination with ActiveAdmin. Then, we could probably use the JIRA nFeed plugin in order to query this external database. However, I'm not sure if this would work as intended and it would be a rather costly to implement such a solution.

Thus, my question is: Do you know any solution that addresses these issues? What do you think about the proposed solutions? Any help is greatly appreciated!

Sumedh Ganta_6g8rqp · Answer

You may create multiple custom fields with these options or use multi level cascade select.

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/5008/multi-level-cascading-select?hosting=server&tab=overview

With behaviours plugin from scriptrunner, you can control the options that would populate

Example for interdependence : https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Marketplace-Apps-Integrations/Behaviours-Plugin-Making-a-field-mandatory-depending-on-other/qaq-p/392911

unknown · Answer

Thank you very much. However, I never developed anything in JIRA myself and these use cases are rather business critical to us. Thus, we'd prefer an existing solution. I'm surprised that a generic object plugin doesn't seem to exist. This use case seems pretty obvious to me 
 Or does anyone know such a plugin?

Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist] · Answer

You can develop a custom field using the Active Objects for this functionality. Not sure if there is an existing plugin that is generic in nature to do this but developing a custom field won't take too long if you want to take a shot at it!