Safe to delete custom fields with no context?

[Andrew Zimmerman]

I took over as Jira administrator on an established instance and I'm working to clean things up a bit. I see a few custom fields that have no context configured at all for any projects or issuetypes. When editing the configuration it just displays, "Not configured for any context."

I would like to delete these custom fields but wanted to ensure it was safe to do so. My main question is, how did this even happen?

Since there is no applicable context, when I search for

"Custom Field Name" is not EMPTY 

in the issue navigator, it just displays the message, "Field 'Custom Field Name' does not exist or you do not have permission to view it."

My assumption is that these fields may have been contextualized for single projects that have since been deleted, and therefore hold no field values with any contexts in our Jira instance and should be safe to now delete.

Is there another way this "no context" situation could exist for a custom field?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Yes, a field can't actually hold data without it having a context, so you can't lose anything by deleting a context-less field.

And, yes, your assumption is correct.  There are other ways to get there (deleting contexts, scripts, apps etc), but almost all context-less fields I've seen are as a result of project deletion

[Andrew Zimmerman]

Got it! Thanks for the quick insight, Nic.

Take care,

Andrew