Deeper explanation on custom cascading fields please

[Shane Corley]

I am new to JIRA and trying to learn the ropes. I have a csv file containing all the software my company uses. They asked me to upload it to JIRA so we can easily access everything online, similar to your system with all your hardware.  Because there are 250+ data entries I want to create a custom cascading field to better organize the software. I'm organizing the programs based on department (parent values). Is it possible to have a parent issue where the user can go and see a cascading dropdown of the different departments and then all the software under the highlighted department? If they click on it, it will then link them to the issue that's relevant to that specific software. Thanks!

[Steven F Behnke · Accepted solution]

A cascading select works by parenting child options to a parent. Thus, if we were selling wine, we could organize them by TYPE (red perhaps), then NAME (red blend). It does not cascade from Parent Issue to Child Issue, it's just a field type; the child values in the right field map to parent values in the left field.

image2016-1-11 12:50:37.png

[Shane Corley]

Okay thank you. So if I wanted to cascade from a Parent Issue to a Child Issue there's no feature to do this so I could just link the two issues correct? This cascading field type wouldn't help me.

[Steven F Behnke]

Correct. This one field just exists on one issue. If you'd care to talk out your use-case I may be able to help you figure this out. For instance, if you'd like to copy specific data to a child issue we could potentially do this using the workflow; we likely wouldn't use a field by itself. It's good to get back to the original need because it's easy to design something in your head that doesn't work in the JIRA universe.

[Shane Corley]

I would greatly appreciate your thoughts on how you would go about this project and implement it since I've only been dealing with JIRA and Confluence for a couple days. Basically my company has a spreadsheet of all the software they use and details about each individual program. I need to make that easily accessible on JIRA. They wanted me to use a cascading method to sort it but that isn't possible with issues. My current idea is to use cascading pages on Confluence for each program and link it to the issue related to that program. The reason they want it sorted with a cascading method is so other employees can find software if they don't know the exact name. Your thoughts are much appreciated. Thanks again!

[Steven F Behnke]

Hey Shane, I wanted to follow up with your request for help.

It's difficult to jump into JIRA administration: This is enterprise software and many people make a living out of knowing these applications and professionally administrating them.

Based on your use-case, I'll offer a simple explanation of how I'd tackle this issue: A project should be created indicating our Software Library. We should create types as logical groupings. Typically we use separate Issue Types if the type needs a unique Workflow or Fieldsets. In our case, we should use the Issue Types to sort our large groupings of software, as if we were using the cascading field. Then we can use a single field to call out the piece of software on each issue, since we've been able to group them using Issue Type.

The rest of the fields can indicate information about the product. The workflow can indicate if the software is In Use or Not In Use.

[Shane Corley]

Awesome, thanks! I've been doing quite a bit of research and I'm definitely on the right track now. I appreciate it!

[John Pfotzer]

Shane,

You may want to check out this plugin:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.sourcesense.jira.plugin.cascadingselect/server/overview

welcome

John