Can you restrict custom fields from being edited by group and/or user?

[Justin Berneburg]

Our business teams are using Jira to manage their process. We have a process (aka workflow) that requires cross team collaboration, but we only want specific individuals to have the ability to edit certain custom fields. Ideally, a handful of custom fields are view only for most users and for others they can view and edit.

The custom fields are important to show on the edit/view screen so we are not willing to only have the fields show in certain transition screens. We really are in need of a feature that allows permissioning down to the custom field level by issue type.

Does anyone have any recommendations or heard of Atlasssian investing in this feature? I can't seem to find a solution. Atlassian seems to be investing in more tools for business type workflows, so I would assume this is something they either have in their marketplace or it's on their roadmap.

[Mikael Sandberg]

One way you could do this is to have a global transition (circular transition) that only a subset of users can do, I would use a project role and then add that as a condition on the transition. You can then associate the transition with a screen that have the fields that you want the user to edit. You would also have to change the screens that are being used for create, edit, and display (default) so that the fields you want to limit access to are only available on the default screen.

[Justin Berneburg]

@Mikael Sandberg I still want the field to be visible on the edit and display screens, so I'm not sure that solution would get me what I need. It sounds and feels like Atlassian just doesn't have the flexibility to have permissioning set at the field level.

[Mikael Sandberg]

Correct, you cannot set permissions on the field level, but by using a global transition you can work around it by only allow a subset of user perform that transition and be able to edit the fields. I have used this workaround in the past when only a manager should be able fill out a risk assessment before the issue could be accepted into the program to be addressed.

At the moment there are no apps that allows you to set field permissions like there is for Data Center, but my gut feeling is that that will change in the future since Atlassian announced that they are moving away from server. You can always reach out the app vendors that offer this on Data Center and see if they have any plans on supporting Cloud too.  

[Justin Berneburg]

Thanks @Mikael Sandberg I will look into the concept of a global transition to see if will be an acceptable solution for my use case. As Atlasssian starts to move into core business process functionality, it will be interesting to see if they look into building their own feature that allows this type of flexibility with permissions.

[Trudy Claspill]

I had to do something similar a few years ago in JIRA Data Center. If I recall correctly, at that time the only solution I found was to to multiple customizations:

• disabling the inline editing of fields
• create custom "Edit" workflow transitions
• set Conditions on the Edit workflows to show based on the users Role in the project
• and I think I did something with custom screens associated to the Edit transitions - I don't recall if I had to not show the fields that the user wasn't allowed to edit, or if I maybe did something with the ScriptRunner app using the Behaviors feature.

My company was not interested in investing money in additional apps, so I don't know if there was an app that could've made that easier.

[Justin Berneburg]

Thanks for the sharing your experience, Trudy! When you say you disabled the inline editing of fields, was that just by removing the field from the view/edit screens?

[Trudy Claspill]

I think this article describes how I did it. Note that I don't know if this is valid for JIRA Cloud.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/how-to-disable-inline-editing-376833061.html