Issue category dropdown not showing current categories

[Charlie Hills]

I'm using Jira Cloud and my project type is "Team-managed business." A couple months ago I set up categories under: `Jira admin settings > Projects > Project categories`

My TODO project immediately picked up those categories as expected. However, I've since renamed one of my four categories and then added a fifth. The new category list appears when I'm looking at my project's Details page. But the old list shows when I'm creating or editing an issue within that project.

I've tried everything, I've searched everywhere, I've asked my favorite LLMs about this, but I just can't seem to find a solution. This feels like either:

1. It's a bug
2. Or my expectations about how this is supposed to work are wrong

Any ideas?

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Charlie Hills 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

The answer is 2 - your expectations are wrong.

Project Categories are not the same thing as the Categories option you see for issues in a Business type project.

The Project Categories you defined is used at the Project level, not at the issue level.

Project Categories help you categorize entire projects. Maybe you would like to group Projects by their owning Department, for example. You could then pull reports of all open issues in the projects in the Department X Project Category.

The Category field available within a Business project is a way to categorize the issues in the project. That is an entirely separate list, and is defined per project. You can add values to that list within a project by simply typing them in :

[Charlie Hills]

Gotcha... I think two things threw me off:

1. I have no memory of typing those in at this level (that's a me-problem)
2. I can't seem to add/edit that list in Task view (only in list view, as you've shown)

But I just tried what you've shown here, and it worked just fine.

Thanks!

[Trudy Claspill]

You're welcome.

It is a known limitation of the product that Categories can't be edited/added from the issue view. You can add your vote to the change request about that here:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JWMCLOUD-483