How do notifications get associated to the 'group custom field value' in the notification scheme?

Question

Hi there,

I'm confused about what 'Group Custom Field Value' means when setting up notifications.  I understand that when selecting 'User Custom Field Value' a notification will be send to the people in the corresponding custom field.  How do notifications get associated to the 'group custom field value'?  When I check the drop down list to the select the custom field to be associated to this option, all the custom fields I created in JIRA are listed. Thanks

Andy Heinzer · Accepted Answer

The Group Custom field value option will allow you to select different kinds of custom fields.  But this is not going to show you ALL the custom fields in your instance.  Obviously the custom fields of Group Picker are available there, but not so obvious is that this section will also show you custom fields of type Select List.

The custom fields of type Select List have predefined values in them.  These values could be just about any kind of text sting, but the key here is that the user isn't defining the value, the Jira admin has predefined what values can be in that select list.  So it is possible to use those fields here, IF the value of that custom field is the name of a group in Jira, like 'jira-administrators'.   Jira is not checking here to see if these custom fields have valid values for group names in your instance.  So that explains why those fields are appearing as options in this notification scheme.  However you can not really expect to be able to choose just any of those fields you see there.  If the field you select does not have a valid group name, then there won't be any notifications from that specific entry.

Not all Select List fields will contain group names, but you could make that work.