Now that you have seen how to manage fields in JIRA, it is time to expand on your Help Desk project to include some customized fields and configurations to help your support staff.
What we will do this time is add a few new custom fields to help capture some additional useful data from the business users when they log an incident. We will also create a customized field configuration specially designed for our support team. Lastly, we will tie everything together by associating our fields, configurations, and projects through the field configuration schemes.
Since you are implementing a support system, one common feature is to be able to escalate the incident, and for every escalation, a group of users will be notified automatically. The automatic escalation and notification aspects of this feature will be covered and implemented in later chapters, but what we do need right now is a way to capture the information, such as the following:
- Does the issue require escalation?
- What is the current escalation level?
- Who should be notified when the issue is escalated?
To address these requirements, we will add three custom fields, one per data requirement.
The first custom field we will add is Is Escalation Required. We want to have this as an option so that not all tickets raised will require escalation. Some tickets may not be urgent or are simply for investigation purposes. We will also mark this field as required, so the users will need to indicate if they require an escalation. To help our users, we will provide a default value of Yes, so tickets by default will require escalation. Since this is a single selection field, we will be using radio buttons:
- Browse to the View Custom Fields page.
- Click on the Add Custom Field link.
- Select the Radio Buttons custom field type.
- Give the custom field the name
Is Escalation Required. - Add two options,
YesandNo, and click on Create. - Select Default Screen and click on Update.
The second custom field is a simple text-based field, which will indicate what level of escalation the ticket is currently at. We do not want users (support or business) to be able to change the values as this should be determined by the system automatically, so we will be using a read-only text field. We will make use of this field in later chapters:
- Browse to the View Custom Fields page.
- Click on the Add Custom Field link.
- Select the Read-only Text Field custom field type.
- Give the custom field the name as
Escalation Level. - Select Default Screen and click on Update.
Finally, the third custom field will contain a list of users from JIRA's user base who will receive notifications when the ticket is being escalated:
Now that we have our custom fields ready, the next step is to create a new field configuration so that we can specify the behaviors of our custom fields. Previously, we decided to make the Is Escalation Required field required, so there will be no ambiguity when it comes to determining if a ticket needs to be escalated. Let's now start with creating a new field configuration first:
- Browse to the View Field Configurations page.
- Click on the Add Field Configuration button.
- Name the new field configuration
Help Desk Field Configuration. - Provide a helpful description Field configuration for the Help Desk team.
- Click on the Add button to create a new field configuration. Now that we have our new field configuration, we can start adding configurations to our new custom fields.
- Click on the Required link for the Is Escalation Required custom field. (If you do not see the Is Escalation Required field in the list of fields, please go back to the View Custom Fields page to check whether the field has been created successfully.)
We have our custom fields, have configured the relevant options, created a new field configuration, and set the behavior of our fields. It is time to add them to a scheme:
- Browse to the View Field Configuration Schemes page.
- Click on the Add Field Configuration Scheme button.
- Name the new field configuration scheme
Help Desk Field Configuration Scheme, as we will be applying this to our Help Desk project. - Provide a helpful description such as Field configuration scheme for the Help Desk team.
- Click on the Add button to create a new field configuration scheme.
With the field configuration scheme in place, we can now activate our configurations. Since this is designed for our Help Desk team, we would want to apply the field configurations to the issue types that are applicable to the Help Desk project, that is, Ticket and Incident:
OK, we have done all the hard work. We created new custom fields, a new field configuration, and a new field configuration scheme; the last step is to put everything together and see it in action:
- Browse to the Project Administration page for our Help Desk project.
- Click on the Fields link from the left-hand side and the Use a different scheme option from the Actions menu.
- Select Help Desk Field Configuration Scheme and click on the Associate button.
Alright, we are all done! You can pat yourself on the back, sit back, and take a look at your hard work in action.
Create a new issue type, Incident, under the Help Desk project, and you will see your new custom fields at the bottom of the page (you will not see Escalation Level, as it is read-only, so it does not appear on the Create/Edit screen). As shown in the following screenshot, the Is Escalation Required field is mandatory and an error message is displayed if we do not select a value for it:
Go ahead and create the incident by filling in the fields. On the View Issue page, you will see your new custom fields displayed along with the values you provide:
