Use rank independent in two different boards | same project

[Celik Vedat]

Hello world,

is it possible to use rank in 2 different boards in the same project where the rank of both projects is not depening from each other?

E.g. if I move a ticket (drag and drop) from rank 2 to 1 in Board A without change the rank (order) in Board B?

best,

vedat

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi @lars.bruhn 

Thanks for asking the followup question here.  I took another look at this recently and I found an inconsistent behavior for this additional rank field in Cloud.  

Back in March of this year I was getting a different limitation here.  However since then, I found that I kept getting an error message of

Ranking is disabled, as the Filter Query for this board is not ordered by ascending Rank. Please check your filter configuration.

anytime the board was setup to use my new rank field called Rank2.  Upon closer inspection of the rank field, I found a new bug in this behavior. 

It appears that Cloud can now be setup to use a second ranking field here.  However in my testing of this most recently, I came across a new bug that can prevent this from working.  More details in JSWCLOUD-21041 that explain a way this could fail.  In my example, I saved the JQL filter as

project=SCRUM order by rank2 ASC 

However when I created the rank field I called it 'Rank2'.  JQL is supposed to be case insensitive when it comes to field names and other JQL terms. However for this particular check it appears that it actually is not.

The good news is that there is a relatively simple work-around here:  Change the JQL saved filter to be the exact case of that rank field,

project=SCRUM order by Rank2 ASC 

Then save that filter, and refresh the board.

I tested this against two different Jira Software Cloud sites and both exhibited this bug behavior message to prevent ranking when trying to refer to the new rank field by a case insensitive form.  JQL should instead be case insensitive even for this ranking check, but it pretty clearly is not doing that right now.  

Try this, let me know if you run into any problems with it.

Andy

[Andy Heinzer]

The rank field is a global field.  This means that every issue in Jira can use this field and in turn will have some rank value set for it.    This value cannot be different depending on which board it appears on.

However what you could do would be to create a second rank field for your instance.   Note: Doing this would put your Jira instance under more load, as you now have twice the ranking operations to complete on every issue in Jira.   If you have hundreds of thousands of issues in Jira, and hundreds of custom fields, this could produce a noticeable increase in overhead or a noticeable performance impact in Jira.   However for smaller Jira instances that are well resourced, this impact might not be noticeable.  

This way you could call this field something like 'Rank2' and in turn you could then create a new filter for this second board that would look something like this

project=ABC order by Rank2 ASC

By doing this, while your original board is 'order by Rank ASC', you could then adjust the rank value on this second board without effecting the rank value on the first.  

[Celik Vedat]

I see, but how would I modify "Rank2" by drag and drop in the backlog than? Wouldn't I be forced to adjust the value of Rank2 manually every time I set a new Rank2?

ty

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No, it would work the same as "rank".  Just need to make sure your boards use "order by" with the correct rank field.

[Andy Heinzer]

What Nic said.  You would have two separate boards, each with their own backlog, and each with their own 'order by' field (one of which uses Rank and the other Rank2).

[searsfranchises it]

Right, but how can you change the value of Rank2 by dragging and dropping?

[Andy Heinzer]

@searsfranchises it The original answer I posted here was something that I tested in Jira Server.  I believe that this answer is still valid for Jira Software Server versions.  However Jira Software Cloud does not appear to be able to manage having more than one functional rank field today.  I believe that the Cloud versions allowed this at one point, but I'm unclear when this change might have happened to prevent it.

I tried to recreate this in Jira Cloud today, and I found that the changes made to the way boards are managed there make it so that there is always one backlog link there regardless of the board switcher used.  Trying to set this up today still won't let me change the rank of this second rank field on a board.  It seems like Cloud has been changed to prevent using the board in this manner.

I am still trying to research this deeper to understand why Cloud does not permit this.  I suspect that Cloud might have turned this ability off since there was a notable performance impact to the system doing this.  For Cloud users things like this that dramatically impact performance can be one reason users are unable to do this in Cloud.

In my research I did come across an old KB that explains this process as well in Changing a Rapid Board Rank field.  But again, this KB has been noted that it applies only to Server.

I'm going to keep looking for more info here, but I wanted to update this thread to let you know, if you're on Jira Cloud, you're not alone in the fact that this can not be done right now.

Andy

[lars.bruhn]

Hi @Andy Heinzer , I am facing right now the same issue as the thread opener explained. Is there any update in that direction?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

There's no update, there's not going to be any change to break global ranking.