Convert Multi Select to Select List (single choice)

[Robert G. Nadon]

Hi all,

I know that according to the documentation https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/changing-custom-field-types-in-jira-158357.html  that it says that all mutli-select values must have only one choice to convert to single select.

My question is what happens if that is not the case.  I plan to check, and double check that all have a single value; however, if I do happen to miss something I was wondering what are the ramifications?  

Thanks,

Robert

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

You'll get a pile of horrid errors every time you try to do anything with an issue that has more than one entry, as the data is effectively unreadable.

You might be able to edit the issues (as long as you make a single selection in the broken field), and view will probably work, but searching, indexing and probably displaying them in a lot of places won't work.

However, if you do miss a few, and you can't edit them, then you can still try overwriting the data in the database if you're careful.

[Robert G. Nadon]

OK thank you!

[Robert G. Nadon]

Hi @Nic Brough [Adaptavist], 

I did this and the field can still be back door made a multiselect.   If you go into the single select that has been converted from a multiselect, the chooser appears to be only a single select but you can still go in and add multiple values.  The reason may be that this is not a custom field I was doing this to fix and affects versions.    Do you know of any know issues with doing this to the JIRA fields fix and affects versions?

Thanks,

Robert

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You can't convert versions to another field type.  It sounds like what you've done is hacked the template so that it can only take one value.  Behind the scenes though, versions remain collections of options.  You've just stopped the entry of a collection with more than one item in it.

It won't cause many problems, because the background code is all still working with a collection.  The only issue might be if you've still got many values in some places, you might not be able to edit or display it.

[Robert G. Nadon]

OK thanks, I am going to recommend that we change back to having multi select for those fields.  The reason they wanted it to be single selection is to know which release the issue was originally found in.    I will recommend if they want that information that I create a custom field to store the information and move versions back to multiselect.

Thank you so much,

Robert