JIRA field with same name - Duplicate Field names

[Girish Jagdale]

I don't see a reason why we are allowed to create a duplicate custom field with same name. Can we log a support ticket to JIRA not to allow the field creation if field with same name (custom or default) already exists? It creates a confusion while selecting the field for reports etc.

[Alexey Matveev]

@Girish Jagdale

I also agree with you. It is very diffictult to have fields with the same names in Jira. I completly agree with your reasons and can add one more. 

I mostly deal with high loaded Jira instances and we have multiple instances of Jira where we test our plugins, scripts, configurations etc before delivering everything to production. 

Right now there is only the field ID which is uniquie. And if you created a custom field in a development environment and then created the same field in the test environment their ID can be different that is why you can not reference a custom  field by ID in your plugin. We reference it by its name and make sure that we do not have multiple custom fields with the same name programmatically. It can be done but there is too much hassle. 

It would be interesting to know why someone would need fields with the same name in a Jira instance.

[Ignacio Pulgar]

I completely support this idea.

I've witnessed a JIRA instance with up to 33 custom fields with exactly the same name, which is a mess both for coding, referencing in post-functions, and searching through the issue navigator.

The reason? They didn't know of the existence of contexts, nor thought of the consequences of having multiple fields with the same name.

[Ignacio Pulgar]

Things can go even worst when custom field names replicate system fields...

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

An older version of Jira used to prevent admins adding or renaming fields to have the same name as existing fields.  You could work around it by doing imports and selecting "new fields", but generally it was really helpful in stopping admins doing bad things.

It was really annoying when that was dropped and duplicates allowed, I never found out who made that silly decision.

[Girish Jagdale]

Thanks all for feedback.

Logged JIRA ticket for this issue 

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-68370

[Morris Ombiro]

I'm a bit dissapointed that it's been almost two years and still no resolution to your worry.