Custom Field Descriptions not displaying correctly

[Bill Davis]

I am on v4.1.1 and I have added a bunch of custom fields to our system, during the building of these custom fields we added a description of the field in the 'Description' text area. We then created a few test JIRA's and the descriptions were coming through on the screens as expected.

After we rolled the new project out to our users they noted a few update to the custom field descriptions, which were made on the custom field details page, but the new descriptions are not appearing on existing JIRA's on on the create page for any new JIRA's.

I ran a re-index thinking that this might help, but it did not.

What would prevent the updated descriptions from appearing?

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist] · Accepted solution]

If you have different field configurations, you will have to update the custom field description on the respective field configuration for it to be effective!

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Associating+Field+Behaviour+with+Issue+Types

[Ibrahim]

I've made a feature request to see if we can make this more intuitive within JIRA.

JRA-40782

The full documentation on custom field description behavior is found here: Configuring a Custom Field.

Adding a snippet of the documentation here as well.

Changing the description of a custom field

Not changing the description in a field configuration means that any changes you make to a custom field's description are not seen.

JIRA allows you to define a description of a custom field, and if the field configuration descriptions are left empty then the original description text will appear when you create or edit an issue, and as help text in the Issue Navigator. However you can also define different description texts in each field configuration and this will override the original field description text.

For example if a custom field "My Field" is defined with a description of "This is my field" and no field configuration changes are made, then the displayed text will be "This is my field" as expected. If field configurations are used and a description "This is my excellent field" is set for the custom field in the field description, then the displayed text will be "This is my excellent field".

[Bill Davis]

Perfect, that is exactly what I was looking for, thanks Jobin!