How does ORDER BY assignee works?

[Gabriel]

Hello team,

One of my users built a JQL where the order is by assignee ASC.

Ex.: project = ABC ORDER BY assignee ASC

The results are showing names in this order:

• Adam B.
• Ada T.

Why is Adam showing up before Ada?

My explanation is that Jira uses each letter sequentially regardless if it’s part of the first name or last name.

In this case, M comes before T.

Can anyone confirm my theory?

Thank!

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Gabriel 

I hypothesize when the JQL has an ORDER BY assignee ASC it is ordering by the user's account ID value and not on the user's display name.

You could confirm that by including more users in your search (to have more data) and then identifying their account ID values to check the sorting.

One quick way to find the account ID values is using JQL...

• enter a query like this: assignee IN (start typing the user's name
• and if you select the user found with autocomplete, that will be replaced with the account ID value

Kind regards,
Bill

[Gabriel]

Hi Bill,

Thanks for sharing :)

Aren't account IDs a random chain of characters that are not necessarily sequential? Even then, there would still be a logic to order results.

How would the system order tickets from these users?

• User 1: 6165c5e0198b4f0068e0fdf01
• User 2: 712020:ed3954d9-4d35-4846-9479-a140be1fcbbbx

We get plenty of data (assignees) when generating our JQL since it calls all tickets in the project and we didn't see anything that would give us a clue as there are no users with similar first names like these 2 users.

Let's see if someone else has a hypothesis.