re ordering priority field for other issues on the same project

[Pablo Acosta]

I need to do the following, I need a Priority field for a certain project, that whenever there is an issue created, with let´s say priority = 2, the old issue with priority 2, will get renumbered to 3, and the original 3 will now become 4, and so on. I only find plugins that will update or autocomplete fields on the same issue, but never on different issues for the same project. is there a solution or tool for doing this? Thank you.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Priority is a fixed length list of possible options, so if you've got 20 of them, you run out when you've got 20 issues.

What you need is "ranking".  This is implemented by Agile/JIRA Software, just make sure you have one single global rank field (you can have more, but it gets messy)

[Pablo Acosta]

Thanks Nic. We don´t have the Agile module, and we need this for an already ongoing project. I was thinking of a tool that can re-number a custom field upon an update of an issue with a higher value for this custom field (called priority)

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Um, ok, you flagged it with Agile, so I thought you had.

There are no tools that will re-number like that.  The problem with the basic idea is that if you number them 1, 2, 3 etc, when someone needs an insert, you have to re-write all the lower issues.  In a system with tens of thousands of issues, that's an immediate fail.  The old version of agile used to use huge numbers with gaps of hundreds between them so re-ranking could move issues into the gaps rather than renumbering everything, but even that fails with the way people use Agile now, so Atlassian moved to using the Lexorank system for it.

I'm not aware of any other ranking field.

[MattS]

Get ready to cringe, Nic ...

You can do your own manual Lexorank ranking by creating a single line text field. Set values A to Z in that field in all 26 issues you start with. When you want to rank an issue between A and B then change that issue's field to AH. Every time to need to insert an issue between two others, you either use the middle value or add a new letter. It works but with the downside that you need a sorted display of the issues before you choose a new rank value.

Alternatively, get JIRA Agile.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, there's a number of ways to do it.  I prefer getting Agile so I don't have to code for any of them