Why is my custom field locked?

[Amy Bailey]

Greetings.  Newbie question I think.... 

I took over admin of our company's JIRA Cloud deployment.  We have a bunch of duplicate custom fields and I'm pruning. But one of them is LOCKED and I have no idea why?  I've looked for doc and answers in this community re: how to unlock, but all information only applies to JIRA Server--not JIRA Cloud.  

I can prune all dups except for the LOCKED one, but want to know the ramifications of a locked field before I switch all our screen schemes to use this field. 

Any info would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you!!

[Alexey Matveev · Accepted solution]

Hello,

You can not unlock a field in Cloud and you should not do it. It means that this field comes with a plugin and the plugin can not work without this field.

[Amy Bailey]

Is there any way to see which plugin has locked this field? 

[Alexey Matveev]

There is not way to find out it. Could you paste the names of the fields here?

[Amy Bailey]

Story point estimate  (custom field)

[Alexey Matveev]

This field goes with Jira Software Cloud. You should not edit it.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That's locked by Software.  You do not want to unlock it, as you will break things.  (and can't anyway on Cloud)

[Amy Bailey]

Ok.   Thank you..... but I'm confused as to how this can be a custom field and yet be part of the JIRA cloud software??  I see the main Story Points field which is provided by JIRA and that is not locked..??  Unless it is part of the JIRA toolkit plugin??

[Alexey Matveev]

Story Point Estimate is used in next-gen projects

[Deleted user]

It's a custom field insofar as you can use Jira Software without Story Points, but when a project that uses Story Points is created (typically via template) than this field is added (and subsequently locked) as it will be used across any and all projects that use story points. Since Story Points are tied to specific functionality within a given project (e.g. they're tallied up on a Backlog view), you do not want to (nor can you) edit/remove them.

[Amy Bailey]

Thank you for the explanations!!  

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Locked fields are locked by the plugins or core code that needs to protect them from potentially inappropriate change or deletion.

Unless Atlassian documentation explicitly says "you need to unlock this field", you should not unlock them.  Some of them probably could be deleted safely, but most will break things if you were to unlock them and change them, let alone delete!

On Cloud, you are completely locked out of this - you cannot unlock fields because you never need to.

[Amy Bailey]

Thank you!

[Karin Lindepuu]

Hi there, I also have a field that is locked and I cannot figure out why. 
I have installed the Quantify app for time management. 
The field that is locked is 'Quantify Time Spent (h)'

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The app has specified that you should not be able to reconfigure it, presumably because the app will break if you change the field contexts or options.

[Karin Lindepuu]

Thanks, that makes sense! 
I just cannot view the field on tickets at all and I have added everywhere and when I search on the ticket where is my field it is stating there is no issues. So I thought that it is now showing because it is locked. 

[Hostvisors]

If you remove a product - like Jira Software - and only have Jira Core on your instance later - is there a way to remove the CF's then?  We really don't want them.