How to convert custom field of type Label to a String or Text

[Zaldy Parian]

When exporting issue data to Excel, custom field of type Label creates multiple columns. I wanted to convert the Label type field to a Text or String type so the values will be in just one column.

What is the best way to do this?

[Randy]

Not possible with the export function.

It'll be easier to just to either add a column that aggregates in excel or write a script to collapse the columns to csv from the export.

[Zaldy Parian]

Hi Randy,

Thanks for your reply.

I guess my first objective is to convert the field from Label to Text type.

Concatenating the values in Excel after export is easy. But I want to solve the issue from the source.

I'm thinking of creating a new custom field (of type Text) and copy-paste the values from the old Label type field. After that, decommission the old Label type field. But this will take ages.

I'm hoping for a better way to do this.

[Randy]

That's a clever solution.  If you have scripting abilities on your instance with something like ScriptRunner it should be fairly trivial to do.

Otherwise you could also go the JIRA Connect route and populate the custom field via the REST API.  This would require a bit more technical ability though.