Searching/Sorting User Stories by quantity of labels applied

Question

Hi there,

Ideally I'd like to sort my backlog by the number of labels in a Custom Field attached to a User Story. From the research/attempts I've done so far it doesn't look like this is possible.

What was provided to me by a colleague was the following JQL:

project = MT AND issuetype in (Bug, Story) AND "myCustomField" is not EMPTY

It would work for what I'm trying to acheive if I could swap out the above 'is not EMPTY' and replace it with 'is > 3' (as in contains more than 3 labels).

If anyone could provide the correct syntax for what I'm describing it would be greatly appreciated!

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted Answer

There is no syntax for it, JQL for the custom field is built to look for values, not count up values.

I'd use one of the scripting add-ons to create a simple scripted field that displays "number of labels" as a numeric, so you can search and sort on that.  Don't even need to put it on the issue screens, as it's for searching only.