Can ranking work on a kanban board as part of a multiple order by sort?

[Brad Colvin]

I understand that Jira assigns an overall rank and that rank is independent of other information on my issues. I'd like to use this functionality in conjunction with my kanban boards to sort and organize issues as they are passed to development. 

I'm trying to accomplish a multi-level sort on a kanban board. I can build my filter so that it sorts by Priority DESC, Impact ASC, Rank ASC.  This gives me the issue list that I'm looking for. However, when I try to use that filter on a kanban board (To Do, In Review, Design Approved, In Progress, Done) it throws me a message that says 'Ranking is disabled, as the Filter Query for this board is not ordered by ascending Rank. Please check your filter configuration. If I 'enable ranking' on the board it changes the multi attribute sort to just ORDER By Rank ASC.  

I'd like to use Jira's rank to provide importance within the priority and impact levels (e.g. there are ten issues with and Impact Level of 1 which one is first in that list). 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

You can only rank a list when it is sorted by a single item of data, and it has to be one that uniquely identifies where an item is on that list.  We can come up with ways to group things in lists (your priority and impact), but that is no longer ranking the entire list, that's ranking within sub-sets.  Jira doesn't have a way to do that grouping (although I think most of us would like it to be added), so it only does ranking.  As the rank field is the only one that can show a rank, you have to order by rank alone for the ranking to work.