Request to add Colors to Jira Issues Calendar

[Craeg Strong]

We are using the Jira Issues Calendar dashboard gadget in our Jira Cloud instance and it works great!

As of today, all issues show up as little orange squares in the calendar day cell according to the due date.   It would be incredibly useful if the *color* of the issues could be controlled.

For us, we would love to show issues in different colors by assignee.   

I could see other folks wanting to assign colors by priority.  Or component.

Last but not least, I would like the ability to control which fields show up in the mouseover. Right now it only shows the description, but it would be great to add the assignee.

This would make the calendar view an incredible asset for our situation-- we are preparing for a critical launch that is only one month away, and every day counts.

(BTW This would bring the calendar closer to the functionality offered by the Trello calendar view which we use and enjoy very much-- but it's not Jira!)

many thanks!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

They already do take colour.

Black = no priority set on the issue, the other colours are displayed according to the settings in Admin -> Issues -> Priority in the colour column.

Assignee wouldn't be that useful - humans struggle to determine close variants especially when not presented together, so when you've got 500 potential assignees, you're going to find it's not that much use.  And what when two people are the same colour?

Component might have a similar problem - fine for a project, but when you've got 20 projects each with 5 components, you're already up to 100 different colours.

I think I'm saying you're probably never going to see that happen - there's too much supporting data needed (a colour per user/component/other-thing) and it would be far too easy to blend.  It would be useful for fields that can only have a small number of options though.  (Or possibly have a default colour and allow you to flag 8 options to be highlighted)

[Craeg Strong]

Thanks for the reply!  We are using Jira Cloud, which means we are using the dashboard gadget version.   The Jira server plugin might be different, so take my reply with that grain of salt.

Jira calendar dashboard gadget works with ONE and only one project.

For the dashboard gadget, the first thing you do is specify your project.   I appreciate that for a scaled project with multiple teams you could potentially have hundreds of assignees.  However, many Scrum teams consist of 7 plus or minus 2 individuals.  Even kanban teams are rarely above 12 people.    In that situation separate colors would probably work fine. 

Got a large project?  Fine don't use colors.   But even for the large organizations we work with the vast majority of their projects are <=7 people.   Color works for that.

Hope this makes sense.  To summarize-- I am asking for features that would make sense for the vast majority ~80% of projects, but would not be useful for the 20% of projects that are larger.

[Craeg Strong]

UPDATE:   We found a very simple workaround.    It's a bit of a hack but it works for us.   When we mark an item DONE, we change its priority to "LOWEST."   this automatically turns the color on the calendar to grey, which makes it very clear which tasks are done and which are yet to be done.    PROBLEM SOLVED!!

Many thanks to Nic for putting me on the right track.

[Jakub Szymanski]

@Craeg Strong 

Hi Craeg, i have tried to do the same in my Jira cloud, but despite changing severity it does not affect the colors on the Change Calendar. Is this working also for this type of calendar? Is there any additional configuration that you have done? I see my priorities in JIRA already have colors assigned to them.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The calendar colours work off the priority field. 

Your custom "severity" field has no place to store colours with its options.