Limit the Number of Components per Issue?

[Daniel Courtney]

Problem: I would like to institute a rule for my teams, "One component per issue", and I do not see a setting, in the administrative section of JIRA, to implement this.

Relevance: Many of our reports look into the breakdown of any given project's work by component, having multiple components per issue can, ever so slightly, misrepresent those reports.

Comments: I know I can skirt around this problem by creating a custom field but, when you are in a JIRA project, it is nice to be able to click on the puzzle icon in the sidebar and view issues by component.

[Nic Brough _Adaptavist_ · Accepted solution]

If you were on Server, there's a hack you can apply to the field template which converts it to single-select.  (It remains a multiple entry field in every respect, but the users can't put more than one option into it)

Cloud does not support that.  Go with the custom field option (and maybe use components for something else)

[Daniel Courtney]

Hey Nic,

I really appreciate the response!

That is interesting but alas, my team and I are on Cloud.

Have a great day!

Best,

Dan

[Heather R]

@Nic Brough _Adaptavist_ What is this amazing hack you speak of? We're on server and would love this.

Bonus points if you know how we can limit the components to a predefined list....

Thank you in advance!

[Nic Brough _Adaptavist_]

You can limit the components to a list by having the project admins define the components correctly (non admins can't edit the list)

To limit it to one, find the .vm file that defines the field layout on edit and change it so it only allows for one selection, then restart Jira.  From memory, it's component-edit.vm somewhere below atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/classes/template/ - a quick search should find it (it definitely has component in the file name).  You may also want to edit the file for bulk change too.

[Sarath]

Hi Nic,

Thanks for blog. Could you please guide me what we need to change in Compontent-edit.vm?

Regards

Sarath

[Katie Minks]

For folks who are on Cloud there is a validator called Field has single value that works to limit multi select fields on the workflow level.  It works beautifully for this.

[Guillaume Wolf]

I found a workaround for this on Jira Cloud.

I added two validators on one early transition in the workflow :

• Multi-select field Components should not have more than one value (excluding values copied from sub-tasks)
• If a value for field Components is not provided during the transition, show the following error: This field is required. 

I duplicated these validators to other key transitions in order not have an issue later on.

For my need, it seems to do the trick.