When a customer reports a bug in our software - we need to record the details of the customer as well as the issue details. For example, we need to know the Business Name, the Manager's name, the Franchisee's name, The phone number, and the fax number of the business reporting the problem. Obviously we don't want to make these Issue fields because we don't want to record the same information each time that business reports a bug!

We can add user properties to track the information - great. But the feature is actually quite useless because you can't make these fields available in the Issue screens!

How does any user of Jira track these properties of the users? Surely this lack of functionality is a glaring shortcoming of the whole system?

Please refer to my live chat session with one of your technicians below earlier....

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You are now chatting with Yuen Chi
Leigh Morum: Hi and thanks for taking my call

Yuen Chi: Hi Leigh, how may I help you?
Leigh Morum: We are evaluating Jira as we would like to use it to track issues. The problem we have is that after adding user properties - e.g. Company Name, Phone Number, Manager's name etc - we would like to make these new fields available to the help desk technicians.

Leigh Morum: I can't find a way of adding these fields to the default screen to either display them to the technician - or to allow editing of the fields by the technician.

Yuen Chi: User properties? May I know what's the JIRA version you are using?
Leigh Morum: It's 3.8.something

Leigh Morum: The latest one I just downloaded a week ago.

Yuen Chi: Cool.
Yuen Chi: I'm sorry to tell you that, currently the user properties feature is reserved for admin use.
Yuen Chi: However, what I can suggest is,
Yuen Chi: You can write custom field to extract these values, then add them to the resolve issue screen.
Yuen Chi: May I know if you have any Java / JIRA API programmers at your side?
Leigh Morum: OK that sounds promising! But I have no idea how to implement. I don't have any Java programmers this side so we're a bit wet behind the hears with this.

Yuen Chi: If that's the case, we can get one of our service partners to get in touch with you regarding this issue.
Leigh Morum: please

Yuen Chi: If you have some techies at your side, you can get them to look at these pages:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/JIRA+Plugin+Guide
http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Custom+Field+Plugin+Module
Leigh Morum: Can someone call me?

Leigh Morum: +27824530754

Leigh Morum: or Skype username lmorum

Yuen Chi: Can I get them to get back to you on Monday?
Leigh Morum: Sure no problem.

Leigh Morum: Thanks for your help

Yuen Chi: Is lmorum@cosoft.co.za the point of contact?
Leigh Morum: yes that e-mail is perfect

Yuen Chi: Do you mind to give me your company name? So that I can refer this back to my manager.
Leigh Morum: Sure - it's Coherent Software Solutions (Pty) Ltd trading as Cosoft

Yuen Chi: Cool, thanks
Leigh Morum: ok thanks & cheers

Yuen Chi: Is there anything else that you'd like information on?
Leigh Morum: One last thing

Leigh Morum: Can I add a custom user field called Phone Number for example - to then be an available field for each user? i.e. without having to add the custom field to each and every user.

Yuen Chi: Based on my technical understanding, yes, this is do-able.
Leigh Morum: Currently you have to go to each user and type in Custom field "Telephone" then the value. I want the new field "Telephone" to then e available for all users.

Yuen Chi: Oh I'm sorry, do you mean you want to apply the value through JIRA web interface on all users?
Leigh Morum: You know how you currently go into edit a user - you just get the email address and the username. I want to get those two as well as the new "Telephone" field. i.e. Without having to add "Telephone" as a field property for each user record.

Leigh Morum: You shouldn't have to type the word "Telephone" a thousand times if I have a thousand customer user
s!
Leigh Morum: You should be able to create a custom field called "Telephone" and then it's available as a property for all users - not just the one.

Yuen Chi: That's currently not possible in JIRA without customizing it.
Leigh Morum: So it's really just a user property for a single user record?

Yuen Chi:
Yuen Chi: For time being and by default, yes.
Leigh Morum: That's a great pity! The whole system looks perfect for our business - but we need to know more than just a username and password when tracking reported bugs or anything else. I would imagine other companies would be in a similar situation.

Leigh Morum: Is there a way of getting around this issue?

Yuen Chi: Actually, our developers would like to hear from our customers about how this should be used.