Search for NULL fields across an entire Jira Project?

[Michael Johnson]

Hello All,

USE CASE

We'd like to search for unused or lightly used fields in a project with an eye toward eliminating them from the project.

METHOD

The project has quite a few custom fields so short of searching for <custom_field> = NULL one at a time, would there be a way to do this across all fields at once?

Any help is appreciated.

Best, Michael J

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

I'm afraid that without coding, a one-by-one "<custom field> is empty" is the only route you have.

If you are going to do it manually, there is one trick to make the seach a little faster. 

Create a filter for "all issues" and a new dashboard.  Add a single "filter statistics" gadget to it.  In the settings for that, select your filter for everything, make sure you include resolved issues and then select a custom field to group by.

This will give you a count of the usage of that custom field.  Note it down, edit the gadget and change the grouping to the next custom field on the list. 

You'll probably find this a bit faster and more informative than writing and running a series of filters.  But, it has the down-side that it can only work for select-type custom fields.

You might use a 2-dimensional gadget instead, with one axis as project and the other your custom fields - this can be more useful if you're looking at things like "who is using it" - I usually find that low-usage fields are only used by one or two projects so I only need to ask their leaders whether the fields are of any real use.

[Michael Johnson]

Hi Nic,

Thanks very much for both those ideas! Unfortunately, clever though they are, I'm too lazy for either of them. Being honest...

What I did, after some exporting trial and error with csv's, is create a filter for the project, add all the custom fields as columns on it, and then Export to Excel (current fields) which gave me a nicely formatted spreadsheet that, with minimal editing, I could then filter for the unused or little used fields. Going this route allowed me to export all 21k+ issues. None of my csv trials produced a very usable result in Excel.

Thanks again,

Michael J

Ps. LOVE the 'Switch to a different user' script in ScriptRunner! So handy for troubleshooting user issues.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That's also a good solution. 

I tend to try to stick within Jira, but that's because I try to keep up with it.  I am never going to knock "export and reprocess" when Jira (or any other system) can't give you a direct answer.

That did lead me to another possbility - a script that can run many filters over REST.

But I think you've solved this already, I think that comment about REST is more for people who might land here when they're only just starting out on data extracts.