Is there a way to set a field not allowing duplicate?

Question

Hi, I'm a new user and feeling my way around. One problem we encounter is different team members creating duplicate epic when not aware of each other's entries. We have a field meant as unique identifier (Besides the system generated #) but it allows members to create duplicates.

When I use MS Access you can simply set a field "Not allow duplicate" and I suppose Jira should have something similar. But where can I find this setting?

From the choice of tiles I could choose from (about 10) I don't see obvious prompts besides thinking "Descriptive short text" is my best choice for the type.

We tried to order the view for easier identification, also tried filter but it is not convenient. So the problem persists and multiply when our epic list gets longer and more members are added.

Any recommendations? Thanks very much!

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

So it's an external ID.

That's fine, but why would you be trying to enforce uniqueness in Jira?  As it's an external system, you're relying on your users to put the right data in, they are the ones who should know that a study is not already included in another place.

Hui Zhang_rfap2f · Answer

Thanks, Yes we create some filters and try to do a search before entries to prevent such cases. They are not super convenient.

Our use of this is to anchor studies at epic level. We have around a thousand studies and generate a couple new everyday. These studies already have their unique IDs that's being used throughout our systems. You can see we'd much more appreciate using our existing study numbers to ID our work, instead of the Jira seq# which is not very meaningful  to us.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Hi,

No, there's no function for that in Jira.  Remember it's an issue-tracker, not a spreadsheet.

You could write a validator that tried to look up whether an identifier has already been used, but you need to understand that is not a scalable solution.

I would question why you think you need a second unique identifier.  There are some tricks you can play in some cases.  Could you explain roughly what it is for?