to be able to populate the text filed values to a dropdown in JIRA

Priyanka Khare

In my instance we have country as text field. I want the values which I have put in this text field to be able to populate as drop down options for Country. In short, this country(text field) values should be populated as dropdown Country(drop down field). How is this achievable?

Alex Christensen

I usually take this process to do a change like this:

1. Rename the current custom field to something like Country (old)
2. Create a new single-select dropdown field called Country
3. Add all of the valid values as options to the new Country field
4. Find all issues in your Jira instance that have some value in the Country (old) field. JQL to do this should be "Country (old)" is not empty
5. Export the issues to CSV
6. In the CSV file, create a new column for Country and map the values to the correct valid values you set up in #3.
7. Import the CSV file (details on how to do that here)
8. Once the fields are updated in the new Country field, remove the Country (old) field from all screens to prevent further editing/use of that field.