"Huh...Well That's Odd...", and other reactions to unexpected Jira behavior: Required Field Missing

[#1]

When I first started Administrating Jira, I inherited an older installation of the software.  We have instructional documents that show screenshots from Jira 3.12!  So it's been here a while and changed ownership more than a few times.  There have been few agreed upon standards and little to no best practice oversight....which means I get to see some really strange things, in deep dark corners of Jira....

 

Today's odd find of the day gets kinda deep and goes into Field Configuration

I had a call, about a user dropping into an old project to see if they could revive it for their team or pick the pieces out to use in a new project for their new project.  So they go to create a new ticket, see what fields are available, how it moves through the workflow, etc and when they try to create the ticket, the get an error about a field being required, yet the field doesn't show up on the screen!

Looking at the screen configuration for the Create screen, and sure enough, it isn't there.  Just for good measure, I look at the View/Edit screen.  Nope, not there either.  Now, easy fix is to just add the field to the screen, have them fill it out and we can proceed.  But the field wasn't suppose to be there and wasn't relevant to the project.

So here's where we get to the head scratching part.  How is a field required, but doesn't have to be included on the screen?!  You have me on that one, but I can tell you how to go in and clear it, so it is no longer required.  

Fields can be marked Required in two ways.  One way is in the workflow, you can use a validator on the transition.  

That's a pretty easy thing to find and fix.

Another way, is that the field was set to Required in the Field Configuration Scheme.  You can see what Field Configuration Scheme your project is using by looking at the project summary and click directly into it from the information found there.

*pro tip* Don't edit Default Configurations!

Scroll down until you find the field that has been marked Required and click on Optional.  It will remove the requirement for the field, and the issue will be able to move past the Create screen.

What weird, wild or odd things have you encountered in your old installations of Atlassian products?  Go ahead and share them in the comments!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

First time I ran into "Issue created but not visible". 

Now, this is not what you've seen more recently in Community where people are on a board, belt "create" and get "issue created but not visible" because the board config excludes the new issue for some reason, but a much older case.

I'm talking Jira 3.0.3.  Where the message was not the (realtively nice) one you get from Jira Software and its board, but just a flat "Permission denied, you can't see this because your admins hate you"  (OK, I added the "because", but it wasn't that far off).

The problem, which you can still do, and, surprisingly does actually have valid use cases, is that in a project you can do things like:

• Browse project:  Security team
• Create issue:  Security team, developers

As a "developer", I can create an issue, but I can't see it, even though I created it. 

There's also a really weird historical problem with it.  I bet your instinct is to add "reporter" to "browse project" so that if you reported it, you get to see it.

Nah-ah, until Jira 7.something, Reporter actually means "anyone who can create an issue", not "the individual who reported it".  If you wanted "the individual", you had to enable "Reporter Browse" permission.  Which was a) separate, b) done by hacking property files and c) could put the whole of Jira into a memory chewing routine that required a complete restart if you got it wrong.  (If any of you landing here are on anything lower than Jira 7.4-ish, please either upgrade, or never use "reporter browse" for anything other than "browse project")