How to safety delete custom fields in JIRA?

Question

I'm trying to determine the best approach in determining whether a custom field is inactive. My thoughts is if a custom field is not associated to any screen, it is inactive.

Is there anything else I should check for before proceeding to deleting the custom field?

Xavier Burais · Answer

Hi,

In addition, there is another plugin, still from botron soft, wich is usefull to know where a field is used (creen, filter, etc...): POWER ADMIN (free plugin)

I've automatically got it with "Configuration manager" (not free this one, but powerfull if you want to migrate a jira instance to another one) so I tried it and it is quite well done, and usefull.

If it could help some people, good for you!

Xavier.

David Willox · Answer

I recently removed a field and used the below method.
* Find existing values: filter all work items using an example field value.

* determine the work item types using the data.
* In the affected workflows, check for scripts and conditions/validators that use the field, removing or modifying these steps.
* Does the data entered in work items itself need saving? Will the loss affect the workflows?
* If yes perform bulk update on existing work items as identified in the filter to update a new appropriate field that can match the values from the old field (if the number of changes is large you may want to do this when fewer people are using the system and making changes as the update can eat up your system memory).* If no simply delete the field, re-index and run the integrity check and ignore the next 4 steps.

* Re-index the system. When doing this be careful, depending on the number of items affected, the system load and your available system memory this may cause slowness or service outage for some users unless you are running a "Lock JIRA and Re-build" index.
* Run a simple walk through test of the work items that were updated to make sure there are no issues.
* Delete the custom field.
* Re-index the system and then run the integrity check to fix any issues.
* Notify users of the field change in case their private filters used this field and are now showing errors.

Alexey Dorofeyev · Answer

You can check field's values before deleting using Custom Fields Usage plugin

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/systems.npe.jira.cfu/server/overview