How to drag and drop stories if board is sorted by priority?

[Leeland]

We'd like to have our projects auto-sort based on priority. So we have a filter that ends with "ORDER BY priority DESC".

When we use priority sorting we lose RANKing so send to top/bottom don't work. This is expected and okay.

However, we also cannot drag stories to/from the backlog and sprints. We cannot assign stories to epics by drag and drop and I cannot find a keyboard shortcut or a simple way to move stories around without individually editing or dealing with all the error messages about rank not being enabled and then massive group edits.

Why remove the send to sprint/backlog right-click just because ranking is disabled?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Without the (or even a) ranking field being used as the sort order, Jira has no way to know how to order your issues. 

Consider a backlog ordered by priority:

1. ABC-nnn - high priority
2. ABC-nnn - high priority
3. ABC-nnn - high priority
4. ABC-nnn - high priority
5. ABC-nnn - high priority
6. ABC-nnn - medium priority
7. ABC-nnn - medium priority
8. ABC-nnn - low priority
9. ABC-nnn - low priority
10. ABC-nnn - low prioriy

No problem with your sprint boundary, let's keep it simple and assume you take the top 4 items into it. 

Now imagine you decide to drag item 9 into the sprint.  Obviously, the priority on that needs to change to "high", but where?  As all 5 items have the same priority, there's no "right" place to put it.

Now imagine trying to mix this up with different priorities.  Put simply, you can not actually order issues without unique placements.  In my example, I've shown three priorities.  Mathematically, that means you can't order more than three issues in your backlog. 

You do have a good point at the end - it is bit of a cop-out to lose "send to sprint", you could just silently rank the issue at the top or bottom of the sprint and amend the field you're using as the order, but that would look odd, as you'd need to ignore the sort-order on not-rank to do it.

[Leeland]

While you describe what appears to be an issue. It is not an issue just a different perspective.

Right now you can define a global filter that looks like this:

project = "Cool Project" ORDER BY priority DESC

Then create a board off of that and JIRA has zero issues with stacking the stories and the epics based of the order they are returned by the filter. In fact, you can even add more filters if you want to sub-sort.

My problem is there is a very handy feature of the backlog view in a project. That is being able to drag and drop stories onto Epics, Multi-Select stories and drag them to the backlog or a future sprint. You can also right-click on a story and have the option to send to the backlog or other created sprints.

That feature has nothing to do with "ORDER BY Rank" which lets you drag and drop tickets of all types to change their ordering. It does eliminate the "send to top" and "send to bottom" of sprint/backlog because RANKING is not used.

I'm asking if the code is sophisticated enough to pop an error dialog every time I try to multi-select when sorted by priority saying "you have ranking disabled so you can't change the ordering" if they instead stop that annoying dialog behavior and still deal with the drag & drop to other sprints, backlog, and multi-select assign to epic abilities.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It absolutely is an issue.  I think you have missed the point.  If you sort by priority, you don't actually have an order (unless you are in the edge case where every issue has a unique value from the priority list).

Please tell me what order these three issues are in, given the data

• Priority = high
• Priority = high
• Priority = high

[Adrian Scholl]

Hi Nic,

in which sequence are items being shown on the active sprint or backlog view when all items have the same priority and the the Filter Query is set to "ORDER BY priority DESC"? Which item is shown at the top and which at the bottom? Is there a logic? It cannot be random, can it?

Thank you for your reply!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It's by issue key after priority (which also gives you age).

[Adrian Scholl]

I did some tests and found that at least on our board the sorting is 1. by priority and 2. by last update ("updated") if the filter query is set to "project = ZZZZ ORDER BY priority desc" in the board configuration. We are using Jira Server v8.5.0.