Can I create a dropdown field with open issues of a particular type?

[Yves Gagnon]

To track issues related to Research and Innovation funding, we want to ensure that all issues can be "related" to a particular research/innovation initiative.  One possible solution was to create a unique Issue Type for the research initiatives, then add a relationship type that specifically allows you to associate with the research initiative issue type (there would be a maximum of ten open initiatives at a time, across two different funding programs).

In concert with that, we could create a dashboard showing:

• All Issues related to each initiative, and
• Any new issues that do not have an initiative relation.

Additional Challenges:

• The list of initiatives changes each year, so the available list needs to update based on which ones are active at the time.
• The vast majority of our users should not have the ability to interact with the initiatives directly, outside of selecting them for association.

Questions:

1.  Is the setup I described above possible?
2. Any competing ideas for how to set this up, and allow a user to have a dashboard as above?  (It would be the user who does work with coordinating those initiatives.)

[Daniel Fietta]

Hi @Yves Gagnon

Our add-on STAGIL Assets - Advanced Links could do exactly that on Jira Server/Data Center. We also have a cloud version available that has fewer features so far (due to the cloud platform restrictions) but looking at your requirements, it sounds like all of this should already be possible with the add-on on Jira Cloud.

You can also request a demo or support with the setup at https://support.stagil.com/.

Cheers,
Dan
STAGIL

[Trudy Claspill]

I did something almost exactly like this with JIRA Server a few years ago.

We created a new issue type for Initiatives and set up an Issue Type configuration for just that issue. We then created a project (what would be a Classic project in JIRA Cloud) that was the only project in which that type of issue could be created. We locked down the permissions on that project to specific user groups to limit who could create and manage the issues there. And then we created a Link Relationship that could be used to specify the link between other issues and the Initiatives.

Here are the challenges we faced.

1. In order to be able to create a link to the Initiative, users who would not otherwise interact with the issue must have minimum permissions to see the issues in the project and create issue links
2. We needed an add-on (Adaptavist Scriptrunner) to be able to filter based on link type to determine if issues that should be linked to Initiatives did not have that link.
3. Some users would use the new Link Relationship, but link to something other than an Initiative.

Our scenario was more complex also in that we had Initiatives with child Sub-Initiatives (which we created as a type of sub-task issue), and we wanted Epics linked only to the Sub-initiatives.

Another idea I had that we didn't get a chance to explore was to add a custom field of type Issue Picker to the issue that need to be linked to Initiatives. That doesn't seem to be available in JIRA Cloud OTB. It might have been something we got from an add-on. In that case, the Issue Picker field could be backed by a JQL filter to limit the issues that could be selected. If you want issues linked to only 1 Initiative, that might work for you. That could give you a simpler method for reporting rather than having to sort through Link types.

[Yves Gagnon]

I did search for an Issue Picker field, and that would be really useful in this case if it were JQL backed.  Looks like all the add-ins for that are server based so far, so that makes it a bit more difficult.  I'm sure I haven't exhausted that search yet... and maybe I can find a way via API interactions and get someone on the dev team to build something?

[Trudy Claspill]

Looks like Atlassian doesn't want to implement such a feature.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-10666

I found this add-on that is for cloud and provides a JQL backed issue picker field

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1218048/teamworkx-issue-picker-for-jira?hosting=cloud&tab=overview

Adaptavist Scriptrunner also does it, though I'm unsure if the feature is supported in the JIRA Cloud version.

https://scriptrunner.adaptavist.com/5.4.47/jira/script-fields/issue-picker.html

[Trudy Claspill]

You might also want to look at the Roadmap feature which lets you add the Initiative issue to the issue hierarchy, or another product for Initiative management that would integrate with JIRA. I think Atlassian has one - JIRA Align. That was just being released when I left the company where we set up the Initiative customization I described.

[Kristian Walker _Adaptavist_]

Hi Trudy,

I can confirm that currently, ScriptRunner for Jira Cloud does not provide the same Issue Picker scripted field option that Script Runner for Jira Server provides.

Regards,

Kristian

[John Funk]

Hi Yves - I think you can get most of what you want. I would add the new issue type and work from there.

[Yves Gagnon]

I am going to combine this with the other answer here...  basically, I'll use a separate project to ensure only one user group is able to create the other issue type, and it doesn't show up in our main project Issue Type dropdown.  That at least hits a couple of our points, and I can iterate from there.