User friendly interface for long multi-select lists?

[cathy waters]

I'm struggling with how to make selection for an extremely long list of multi-select values more user friendly. for example - there are upwards of 600 values, and it would be common to have 40-60 selected. Ideally we'd like to have the ability to select using 2 fields like the available values and selected values from the selection list and the abililty to Add / Remove the the selected list.

There seems to be a method like this within the administration side of JIRA (e.g. for selecting exceptional user groups on the "Comment required on transition" Workflow Validator). I don't see an equivilant in the Data Renderers for Multi-Select.

I tried segmenting the multi-select into a few multi-check box fields, and using the Post Function to Copy field to field to merge the values from the multi-check box fields into the multi-select field. I made sure the first multi-checkbox field was copied into the multi-select field, and the subsequent post functions "added" their multi-checkedbox values into the multi-select field using the Copy

This looked promising, when something was checked in each multi-check box field was non-empty. However the post function failed for any of the multi-check box field that was empty.
I haven't found an easy way to make the post function conditional on a field being non-empty.

Has any one else tried to solve this problem?
Do you have any other suggestions?

Thanks

Cathy Waters

[cathy waters · Accepted solution]

Well for now it looks like we'll use the multi-checkbox field type, and segment the checkboxes to reduce the overall length of the field. I finally saw the script modification that allows us to the the width as well as size on an mutli select field and that has helped as well

[Alexey_Rjeutski__Polontech_]

As I see from https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-32290- it is not developed yet for jira. As an option you can write your own plugin with needed field behaviour and renderer.

[cathy waters]

Thanks for the suggestion Alexey. Unfortunately I don't think our users would find typing 40 + long names ahead very user friendly especially when many start with these start with 10 - 15 character long prefixes shared by 20-150 values each. I'm not yet skilled in creating my own plugins. Can you point me to a sample Plugin that deals with custom field types and renderers, in case I need to boostrap myself?

[cathy waters]

If there are no solutions readily available, can you point me to an example that could serve as a starting point for creating a plugin for a new field type and renderer?