Custom Field contexts - Am I missing something?

Question

Our company-wide Jira Instance has 100+ projects across many subsiduaries. My team, with their 20 projects have 10 really useful custom fields that they need in addition to the standard items.

I can add these fields to a default screen set, and easily associate this set of screens (screen scheme) to my projects. If I clone a project, this screen scheme gets copied too.

I can do all of this without disturbing the other 90 or so projects.

But create a custom field? I cannot find such scheme paradigm. I have to manually, for each CF, select which project to add it to from a multi-select list of 100+ projects.

Create a new project? I have to update each of ten CF's to add that project to their context.

This is so stupid, I must be missing a trick. There must be some way of grouping my ten CF's together into a group, rather than selecting "global context" and adding this new CF to every project in the instance.

What have I missed?

Russell Zera · Answer

Yeah, my main take-aways and items I've looked at implementing are standardized project configs with 3-5 variants and setting up a 'shopping cart' style system for newly requested projects to go through and order the different existing configs and features they want. That was the part that I really liked the most.

Alternate thought (I thought about this last night as a method I used to use) If you are running JIRA Server, you could always edit the configs on the back-end and copy the CFs you want to use as a 'template' and then paste that config into your newly created CF. If you're good digging around and editing that way, and you have a lot of projects and don't want to always multi-select, that could save you a lot of time.

kevin conroy_sgx0kr · Answer

Interesting talk but it was mainly "use Crowd, tweak the Cache, use Service Desk for sys admin"

Nothing about the grief or otherwise of Custom Field management across projects.

kevin conroy_sgx0kr · Answer

Hey matt, thanks for the reply - that's EXACTLY how it looks to me; make all CF's global context, then make the grouping via ITSS;

it's easy to make a screen scheme for a project class eg:

* All mobile SW development ITSS
* All CRM ITSS
* All Factory Manufacturing ITSS

And control the "visibility" of the CF's that way

It's not ideal, because if you wanted a CF in two of those ITSS's, but with different values, say, for a drop down, you'd still have to manage the project context by hand on the CF in question.

It's still a grade-a PITA, which I'm (not) surprised Atlassian hasn't addressed.  I'm not afraid of automating it via some REST i/f - but there isn't one.  Some hints of a possible hack via the Java API