Order by count of items in custom field

[Abby Kaske]

Does anyone have a solution for the following situation?

We are using an internal 'Icebox' backlog for customer and employee product feature requests that the product owners review to determine items that should be prioritized and moved into their actual backlogs.

We have created a custom mutli-select field where every customer is listed. When a request comes in from a customer, we mark that customer in the custom field. If more than one customer is requesting the same feature, we mark them both off in that custom field (since it's multi-select) or merge issues together that could be combined and make sure that each customer is checked off in that custom field.

Anyway, we want to be able to sort based on the count of items checked off in that custom field. Based on what I've read so far, Jira cannot do this.

I'd like to be able to make this happen without having to manually update another field every time we mark off another customer (which seems like an easy-to-implement-but-pain-in-the-butt workaround.)

We do have JiraAutomation, but I'm not sure if it would be able to recognize the custom field item count increasing and automatically update a numerical custom field based on that.

I figured I'd put this question out to the community in case anyone else has solved it, or has an idea :)

[Abby Kaske · Accepted solution]

I figured it out in automation using their smartvalues!

Trigger action: when values changes for (first custom field with the drop down that we wanted to count)

Then: Edit issue for (a custom field to house the count number)
value= {{issue.customfield_XXXX.size}}

I guess if anyone else ever comes across this, here ya go :)

[Abhishek]

Hi @Abby Kaske ,

Thanks for giving the hope that something like this is in fact possible on Jira.
However, can you explain it in a more novice way? For someone like me who is relatively new to Jira?

I tried following the step that you mentioned but I got stuck at "Edit Issue for ( a custom field to house the count number)". I created a custom numeric type of field which was not available in the dropdown at this step. Not sure how to progress ahead

[bradley]

I too would like an explanation for newbies!