How can I prevent the priority field from being edited by any user?

Question

Background:  Since the status lozenge in a JIRA issue cuts off all but the first 10 or so characters (rendering long statuses completely unreadable) we came up with a creative work around:  Tie the priority to the status, that way we can harness the fact that a priority is displayed by a small icon which can be colored and have a number in it (this way our workflow has a number at each stage).  This way our users who can't read the status lozenge can see the priority icon and know immediately where a JIRA issue is in our workflow.

The Problem:  Users fail to understand the importance of the workflow status and think changing the priority actually is changing the status (when really they should be doing a workflow transition to update the status AND the priority).

My Question:  Can I lock down the priority field so that it can only be modified by a JIRA workflow transition and NEVER by a user clicking on that field?

Charles Jamison · Answer

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist-, Thanks again,

For us the priority is just an icon that indicates where the workflow is.  when the workflow gets advanced the priority is updated by the workflow correspondingly.  It is totally just a visual hack to work around the status lozenges that truncate the lozenge text.  So I WANT the priorty to show up and have a value, I just don't want users to ever change it.

Lastly, FWIW, on the "Configure Screen Scheme" page in JIRA, many of the screen schemes only have "Create" and "Default" listed - I guess there is a system default that worked fine so the person who built that part of our JIRA cloud instance never added one for "Edit" or "View" - I could add them in via the "Associate an issue operation with a screen", but they aren't there now - so not all admins will necessarily see them (which is why I couldn't understand/follow your initial instructions).

Thanks for the help!

Charles Jamison · Answer

I am on JIRA cloud unfortunately.  I did find a way to restrict the usage of the priority field though.  It is a bit of a work around and depends on 2 facts (I think):

1) I never want ANYONE to edit the priority field - only workflow transitions should modify the priority field.  (So I don't need to worry about making it editable in some circumstances and not others).

2) The priority field is special in that it is mandatory, so if it is removed from the "configure screen" view of the screen in question, it still shows up on that screen.

Removing it from the "configure screen" for the default screen for that issuetype means it can no longer be modified but still shows up for viewers, which is exactly what I wanted.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

" screens for the issuetypes in question " - yes, those are where I was pointing - there's one screen for create, another for edit and a third for view.  You've hit the "edit" one and removed priority.

Priority is a "system" field, so when it has a value, it is always shown on "view" whatever you do, which is quite annoying (a bug, imho).  I think you should find it only appears for issues which were created with a priority - if the users could have that as optional, leave it blank on create, you would not see it on new issues.