Custom field removal

[Gokul Pradheep]

Is that safe to remove custom field which is not used by any screen so far?

[Pavel Junek · Accepted solution]

Hi Gokul,

Deleting a Custom Field means that the historical data on the tickets is also deleted. Looks like CF isn't used according to your description. You can also use the JQL function to verify whether the CF contains any data:

"custom field name" is not EMPTY

If there are no results, the field is probably not used. If there are results, verify the validity. Unfortunately this will not help to find issues from the projects where Permission Scheme doesn't grant you browse project permission/hidden with Issue Security.

You can try this addon for help - Optimizer for Jira 

Pavel

[Gokul Pradheep]

@Pavel Junek - Thanks for your practical clarification. We've decided to keep the cf as it has historical data

[Daniel Ebers · Accepted solution]

Hi @Gokul Pradheep

deleting custom fields can be tricky - depending on the complexity of your installation.

What Pavel said earlier is absolutelety right.

Using the query

"custom field name" is not EMPTY

I felt in a trap in earlier days, like he explained in my practical example there was one project which was locked down using Issue Security and the JQL query returned an empty result set.
This was the affected issues were just not shown to me, because of Issue Security.

Luckily there were only a few issues affected but cleaning up custom fields can lead to data loss if not checked properly.

Another interesting topic to consider is if the custom field is part of any validator/condition in whatever workflow.
Finding them is not so easy - you will likely need to review them all.

At least for Server (on-premise) "Power Admin" helped us several times in the past if a clean up is possible without any dangers. Pavel mentioned the Optimizer - this is also a good alternative we used in the past.

Regards,
Daniel

[Gokul Pradheep]

@Daniel Ebers - Thanks for making understand.

[Deleted user · Accepted solution]

Hi @Gokul Pradheep ,

I will tell you the way I know.

Yes, you can delete the unused custom fields from your instance, there is a simple way to delete the custom fields using this app, Jira Command Line Interface (CLI)

Provide the custom field name/id to the below CLI action and run the same:

--action removeCustomField --field "My-field" --continue 
(OR) 
--action removeCustomField --field "14229"

Thanks,
Raja 

[Gokul Pradheep]

Hi @[deleted] - Thanks for showing possibility in JIRA CLI.