Issue Type - Building vs. Organizing

[Will Tubbert]

I apologize if this has been asked in some way before, I struggled to come up with usable search terms to find results along the lines of my question.

I know that a single Issue Type can be assigned to separate Groups, so that in the Customer Portal, the Issue Type can appear under multiple categories (the example I use below is organizing the Portal by system supported). However, is there a way to capture the Group selected when the Issue is Created without also requiring a field within the ticket where the user needs to re-designate the selected Group.

In the end the question is if we are able to achieve a user experience goal by only having to maintain a single Issue Type/Form combo, or if we need to maintain several similar Issue Types with minor variations. The example below clarifies the kind of scenario we are attempting to address:

We support ~10 programs for our organization, and the desire is to organize the Customer Portal by those 10 programs. So the person would select Program A, then get a list of Issue Types (e.g. Change, Incident, etc.).

Unavoidably each system will have a number of custom Issue Types due to the large variation in the information we need to collect.

Others seem like they can be managed by creating a single Issue Type (such as Report an Incident) and assigning it to the Groups representing those systems, coupled with Forms utilizing Conditional sections.

In the latter scenario, what we want to avoid is the user coming into the Customer Portal, selecting System A, selecting one of the more generic tickets, say "Report an Incident", then immediately having to click the System dropdown and select System A again.

The only way I currently can think to overcome this is to create separate "Report an Incident" tickets each dedicated to one of the Systems (so if 8 of our Systems need that Issue Type, we need to create 8 Issue Types with only one or two small variations to pre-select information.

Is there a way to capture that System A was selected from the Customer Portal within a single master "Report an Incident" ticket (e.g. somehow pre-populating a System field with the portal System selection)? In my example above, if the User selects System A, then Report an Incident, and when the Ticket Request comes up, the System field within the ticket will already have System A selected.

[Brant Schroeder · Accepted solution]

@Will Tubbert Welcome to the Atlassian community

Just to clarify the forms created in a portal that are associated with groups are called request types.  Multiple request types can be associated with an issue type but each request type can only have a single issue type.  A request type can also have multiple groups.    

If you would like to preset a field on a request type in your portal you will need to have a unique request type, as you explained above, for each group.  Or you can have a single request type but the user would need to select the system as in your example.  

I would suggest creating a unique name for each request type to make it easier for users to find them in search.  If you use Report an Incident in all 8 groups and I search for report an incident it will be very difficult to know which one to select as all 8 will show up.  If you label them as System A - Report an Incident or Report an Incident in System A it will be much easier for the end user.  

[Will Tubbert]

Thank you for confirming my suspicion.

Sorry for the confusion on the language. "Issue Type" did refer to "Request Type" and by Forms, I am referring to the Custom Forms that can generated and added to a Request Type.

Unique naming was part of our plan, but I appreciate you going that extra mile in the recommendation.