Search for issues with an 'unknown' label

Question

Hi all,

We use about 10 different labels in our Jira, sometimes we use more than one label per issue.

But sometimes someone makes a spelling error when entering a label and the wrong label is used on a issue.

Does anyone know how to search for issues with an 'unknown' label?

I tried the search syntax: Labels not in (label1, label2, label3)

But that only works when just 1 label is used. As soon as two or more labels are used, it will no longer find anything.

Best regards,

Floris

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted Answer

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

The only way you could do this would be to identify the mis-spelt label - imagine you've got Jira, Gira and Jirra labels, you'd need to know the two misspelt ones in order to search for them.

As you can't really search for a negative, and Jira has no way to list all the labels in one go (heck that was the first app I wrote for Jira server was a simple report to list them all)

There are things built into Jira that can help you with this though, other than a flat list of all labels.

Run the search "labels is not empty" and save it as a filter.

Create a new dashboard, and add these three gadgets to it (frankly, you'll probably only need the third one, as it's the easiest to read...)

* If you know which project the label is in, you can use a "Labels" gadget to get a list of all the ones in use in the project
* A "heat map" can show you all the labels used on the issues in your filter, but you may have to squint to find yours, as the writing size is proportional to the amount the label has been used
* A simple "filter statistics" on your filter, grouped by labels, and sorted by total will give you a list of all the labels used and the amount they have been used.  The mis-spelled one is likely to be at the top or bottom of the list with only 1 entry

All of them allow you to click on the label to take you to a search for that label!