Priority field not listed by default

Question

The global Priority field is not displayed on the screen when creating a new issue. It only appears when checking it in the Configure Fields list.

That only needs to be done once for each Issue type, but what I don't understand is how a field can be Required (such as this one) and not be listed on the create screen by default?

Can someone clear this up for me?

Thanks,

Jozef

Jozef Vandenmooter · Answer

Hi Nic,

I'm sure it's me (I'm a JIRA newbie), but I still don't get it. I can follow your reasoning for a regular field, but the Priority field is a global system field that's defined as Required. It does not show up on the create screen unless added by the user. We want it to be visible at all times. How do we do this?

I attached screenshots of what I m?ean. In the first one the Priority field is not listed. In the second one, you see the Priority field in the Configure Fields dialog  (incidentally, it's the only one in there that's defined as Required). The third one has the field listed because it was checked in the Configure Fields dialog.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

The fields a user chooses to select from ones available is up to them.  If they choose to deselect a mandatory field, that's up to them.

Think of it this way:

I have set a preference that says "Show field X, hide Y and Z".  This is a global setting for all my screens, because I don't care about Y and Z.

We have projects A, B and C.  I'm quite happy with my fields.  One day, an admin says "in project B, Y is mandatory".  So my config breaks that.

You might say "well, now this is invalid, we should change all of Nic's preferences to take account of it".  Problem - my preference is a simple list, project agnostic.

So you now have two options:

1. Write a huge pile of code to store my preference for every project
2. Add yet more code to already complex "field visibility" rules which needs to run for every field on every issue for every combination of issue type and project

Or...
3.  Do zero work - let the current functions tell the user they've excluded a mandatory field if they miss it because of their preferences.

In an ideal world, I'd go for 2.  In the real world, 3 works well enough for the edge-case and Atlassian have tens of thousands of requests that are vastly more useful

Jozef Vandenmooter · Answer

Actually, the Priority field has a default value of Low, so it will never be blank. However, we still want it to appear on the screen when creating an issue at all times (without requiring user intervention through the Configure Fields dialog).