What are the implications of hiding the Resolution field?

Question

I vaguely recall that changing a project's field configuration to hide the Resolution field has implications for some of JIRA's features, particularly dashboard gadgets (i.e. they stop working).

Can anybody clarify for me what might be the implications of hiding Resolution? I get the sense that it's kind of essential to the inner workings of JIRA, and that it's not really a good idea to hide it; but I want to know the details.

Thomas Schlegel · Answer

Hi David,

you're right. You can't remove the resolution field from the views, just hide it in your field configuration. Sorry for the wrong answer, this field always confuses me.

I tried a little bit with the resolution field in our testing environment and it seems that, when the resolution field is hidden, then new issues are not treated as open or closed automatically. If you query for "resolution = unresolved" the issue that was created after resolution was hidden is not part of the result. The issues created before are part of the result.

But if you enable the resolution field again, the issue created without resolution field is not caught by the query "resolution = unresolved" until you make some changes to it.

So, if you hide the resolution field, it will be ok, but you have to check, whether a Jira function is checking the resolution field for quering the state of the issue. This won't work then, the issue simply has no resolution.

David Pinn_1ll7gn · Answer

Thanks Thomas. I understand that the only way to hide the Resolution field is to set it to 'hidden' in the field configuration, in which case, it cannot be given a value by a workflow post function. Also, any queries that include a clause involving Resolution will not produce any result. That's the case, right?

Thomas Schlegel · Answer

Hi David,

if you hide the resolution field (and you don't set any resolution automatically, if an issue is closed), you will see all your issues quite often in queries that show "all open issues". Jira treats issues without resolution as open issues, regardless of any workflow state.

If you want to hide the resolution field, don't forget to set a resolution in the workflow post function of the transition that closes the issue and set it to none if you reopen the issue.