Is there an (easy) way to have a dropdown custom field dynamically populate with users?

[Elliott Lemberger]

So, I've added a custom field to tickets on my Jira Design board called "Designer." Idea is I want to have a Designer dedicated to a ticket/feature even as the assignee changes.

Right now, I just manually populated the list of options in the dropdown with all the designers on my team. Just wondering if there's any way to have it dynamically populate a list of Jira users, say with a specific role (ie: Designer).

Thanks!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

If you use a standard "user picker" custom field, you can tell it to list users from a group or role in the project.  I'd probably set up a "designer" role to use for it!

[Elliott Lemberger]

Thanks so much for the suggestion. I did exactly what you suggested, and I'm half way there...

I'm having a hard time with getting the field to auto-fill. Ideally, I click into the field and the drop down shows the 8 users in the group I've filtered it to. But there are no auto-suggestions. After typing in the field the auto-suggestions are inconsistent. If I type one team member's entire name, he then shows up as an auto-suggestion. If I type another member's name, they don't show up at all. Any ideas here?

Thanks!

[Elliott Lemberger]

For example. Again in some cases I can type and entire name, and I still get nothing...

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Do you have the "global" permission for "browse users"?

[Elliott Lemberger]

Yea I believe every user does. I don't have any issues with auto population on the assignee field, so seems like an issue specific to my custom user picker field...

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That's odd, mine auto-filters fine.  But I notice that "designers 2" is not in the "users" panel where you're looking at assignee, which suggests it's not a user-picker?

[Elliott Lemberger]

Hey @Nic Brough -Adaptavist-, the field appears in the users panel once it has a value, which it seems the only way to add is in Edit view.

Once is there though, auto-fill is very choppy.

Notice, "a" doesn't give me anything.

"an" does. But sometimes I can also type a full name and get nothing.

Interestingly, when I try and assign a default value to the field, it can't find me by user name (even when I type my full email...I know it only says "e" below).

Thanks again! Didn't realizing I was opening such a can of worms :P 

[Elliott Lemberger]

So when I turn off filtering for the field, user suggestion seems to work OK. I can't get any filtering to work. It just brings up suggestions for ever user. It's not the end of the world, as it seems to work OK.

Ideally though it would have the dropdown like the assignee field, or ideally it would only suggest users in the Design Group but not sure what I'm doing wrong here.

Thanks again!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It sounds like the filtering is being done on all possible users, but when you restrict the list, it's not limiting the filtering to the current possible list.

Feels like a bug to me.  What's the version of Jira?

[Elliott Lemberger]

I have looked everywhere, read every post I could find on it, but can't find my jira version number! Any suggestions?

[Elliott Lemberger]

Oddly, it's started working now, not having changed anything. Maybe it took a while to index my group or something? Either way it seems i'm all good to go now.

Thanks for the help!

[Elliott Lemberger]

BTW, I do notice it doesn't start auto-populating until after I've entered 2 characters, unless Assignee and Reporter that start suggestion after 1. Really not the end of the world but open to any suggestions if anyone know how to make it auto-suggest after only 1 character.

[carolyn french]

Hi Elliott,

Are you on Cloud or Server? Screenshot looks like Cloud, but just wanted to make sure.

I haven't personally used this add-on, but it's free, so maybe you'd be interested to give it a try (available for Server). Seems to solve the particular problem you have.

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/5063/issue-alternative-assignee?hosting=server&tab=overview

Carolyn