JIRA Custom Field - large Select List.

[Lisa Evans]

I have a need to create a very long select list as a custom field. The list would be 300+ and growing. What is the recommendation for this type of data? Are there any other techniques for long select lists?

[April]

Oh, of course ScriptRunner already has an easy, no-code answer for this, which I just read here.

I went to Behaviors, added one, then in fields I just entered an initialiser:

With no conditions. After saving this, I "mapped" to all issue types in all projects, and now look! My horrible multiselect with several thousand values is as easy to use as Labels:

Thank you ScriptRunner :)

[Mick Lovell]

The documentation from the link showed some neat examples of connecting the select list to outside sources like github and external databases, and it shows how to feed data from jql searches like issues in Jira.  If you don't mind sharing, how did you connect the text field 'Client/s' to the multiselect custom field?  Thanks.

[Jeff Patterson]

Thanks so much, that's an awesome and super-easy solution!

If only all of Jira was as good as ScriptRunner  :-) 

[April]

Ha Jira is just the annoying pre-req we need to install in order to run ScriptRunner ;)

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Can you break it up? Group up the options into (say) 10-ish groups of around 30-ish items each and use a cascading select?

Your other options basically mean some coding - I've seen this done with a modification of the labels field (so people aren't offered much, but it starts guessing as they start typing), and a plain text field that took a good guess at matching items and used a validator/post-function to check and correct entries.

[Lisa Evans]

Nic, thanks for the quick response. I did see this answer to a similar question in Answers, but it's not an ideal solution for our needs. We do not want to create any new customizations that require coding, and grouping is not an ideal option either.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I'm afraid you are pretty much stuck then. Jira's standard select-type custom fields are designed for sane (i.e. short) lists of specific values.

[April]

Hi Nic!

We have a field like this for Clients which is pretty sucky to deal with. While I'm grateful that the size of this list is a problem, I've been wishing I could do something nicer for the poor humans who use it.

If I gave them a text field, how could I get them to use a defined delimiter (like 'one per line'), and do you have have any examples of making an array from text input and then using fuzzy matching to set a multiselect field, assuming the text field is not empty? There will definitely be cases of several near matches, as companies often do business as multiple similarly named entities. And then there's spelling and punctuation, like is 'limited partnership' spelled out, or LP, or L.P., etc. 

I'm not sure where to even start :(

Thanks!