Why do I see a custom field listed multiple times in the Issues tab?

[Michael Thompson]

Hello everyone,

I've been dabbling with some SQL statements to try and pull data direct from the Oracle database. Most recently I got a list of all custom fields with a pretty basic query:

Select id, cfname, description FROM customfield ORDER BY cfname ASC

I got a display of all my custom fields, but I noticed that quite a few cfnames were repeated with different ids. For example:

ID        CFName

10568  Contact Role

10567  Contact Role

10570  Contact Role

10569  Contact Role

I went back into JIRA, went to the Issues administration tab, and clicked on Custom Fields. Sure enough, I see four listings for Contact Role, and they are identical in every way.

Can anyone explain how this is possible? I now see this for quite a few custom fields.

[Ignacio Pulgar · Accepted solution]

You may click on the cog icon > Configure in order to check the selectable options in each of those custom fields.

If the options were the same for all of them, I'd say that you may delete all but one of them.

However, as all those fields are displayed simultaneously in the same window, it is weird that users hadn't pointed out this duplicity of fields, so maybe there's a reason fir all those fields to exist.

I'd recommend avoiding the creation of fields with exactly equal names, though.

[Michael Thompson]

Thanks Ignacio, I did check the configurations and every facet of these fields are the same. I have noticed that since I took over as the JIRA admin, none of the custom fields I have created are duplicated. However, I also do not use duplicate names. I suppose it's possible that the previous admin repeated himself, but that would be a horrible practice for any tracking system!

[Steven F Behnke]

Do you have any plugin that would be creating fields? What would be creating fields called "Contact Role"?

[Michael Thompson]

The former JIRA admin would have created Contact Role (no longer with the company). There are no plugins that would create the field, it's a manual process, and fields are only created by the JIRA admin (currently that's me :)), and not without a request posted to our maintenance project and approval from a manager to add the field.

[Michael Thompson]

I beliieve Ignacio has led me to the answer. I checked with the Product manager who deals with the projects associated with these duplicate fields. it appears that this project tracks external customer information, including multiple company contacts. It appears that the former JIRA admin re-used the same name for custom fields.

This will be a painful maintenance task. I have 363 custom fields, but 303 unique cfnames. Time to untangle the mess.

[Steven F Behnke]

Wow... That is not good. :p 

[Dayanand]

@Michael Thompson How do you able to find the duplicate 363 custom fields?

[Michael Thompson]

@Dayanand 

I ran a SQL query against our Oracle database.

SELECT id, cfname, description, defaultvalue
FROM customfield
ORDER BY cfname ASC

[Dayanand]

@Michael Thompson ,

Thank you for the query also is there any way to find duplicate custom fields used per projects (project specific duplicate custom fields).